Regarding 4.6% quote for Mr. Strombeck

About seven years ago when I was using the internet to search for property in Florida I began receiving daily spam addressed to David Strombeck (not my name) containing the same misspelled, ungrammatical offer of a low rate loan from an undisclosed source in Brazil, Russia, China or some such exotic place. Each one contains a different, always false return URL. For the past seven years I have received these messages from two to six times a day, seven days a week. It’s only a tiny portion of the spam I receive, much of which offers refinance rates on property I haven’t owned in many years and that wasn’t financed in the first place.

There is never any way to get off the lists these people work from; of the few who offer an opt-out option, most are inoperative and of course, opting out doesn’t prevent anyone from selling your data. For years I dutifully forwarded some of the worst spam to the ISP and to http://www.spamcop.net but it’s had no effect.

Spam filters, both in my browser and at my ISP filter out hundreds of offers of sex, drugs and home mortgages every day, but spam mutates faster than the HIV virus and much of it gets through. One learns to live with it.

It’s going to be a lot harder and more expensive to deal with cell phone spam. Screening my home phone calls has been a necessity for many years, National no-call Registry notwithstanding. I’ve now begun to get solicitations on my cell phone for kitchen remodeling, life insurance and – you guessed it; home loans.

David Lazarus writes today in the San Francisco Chronicle that the next frontier for spammers is text messaging. Text messaging of course isn’t free; some users pay up to 10 cents per message and if all the spam that came into my internet accounts were addressed to my cell phone, I’d need one of those loans.

A spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless said her company filters up to 50,000 spam messages every day. That of course is miniscule when compared to the tide of internet spam that clogs world communications, but the trend is clear. The wireless communications companies are either going to have to find a way to eliminate it or like many have already done, watch their customers block all incoming messages. They make money on text messages however, so I don’t expect much in the way of action.

Let’s face it; the business of the world is business, even if much of it is criminal business. There is more profit in a world where every mode of communication from your doorbell, mailbox, telephone, television and computer becomes the property of those who want to sell, cheat and defraud and your convenience, safety, privacy and indeed your freedom, matters not at all.