ozzy47 is correct. Many millions of dollars are sent to the scammers and cause a lot of heartache for the victims.

It is said that the third largest source of income in Nigeria after oil and minerals is fraud.

It is estimated that in Lagos alone there are over 150,000 active scammers and they send out a LOT of scam emails. They just work the percentages.

The last guestimate of scam websites was 7.5 million. So sadly the scammers are stealing a lot of money.

The scammers and hackers and their supporters need to be stopped.

I guess I did not think of it that way about new people coming to the internet. I agree we need to stop these guys but it really does not seem possible without removing some freedoms we have now on the net.

I know some of the phishing emails seem more legit than others but some are just so stupid and obvious.

I wonder how much bandwidth these spam emails take up every year. It must be a huge amount.

You would be suprised at how many of the emails they send are from sites with un-secure email capabilities, they just piggyback off ot these sites, and use their resources, costs them nothing.

We can help to stop these scammers by all working together. The scammers and their supporters need our combined action to stop them.

The anti-fraud websites are doing a very good job against large odds. The arrest rate of the scammers is increasing now due to the hard work of some very dedicated people. It will continue to increase as we evolve.

Yes some of the scam emails are very poor and others are very advanced.

The aligning of some of the ex Russian IT guys who came on the market after the closure of the "cold war" with the "419 scammers resulted in an increase of sophistication in some of the scams. Especially regarding hacking procedures.

Fortunately we anticipated a lot of this and set in place some methods for dealing with them.

Although we are vastly outnumbered we are making good inroads into stopping many scams.

I didn't mean how much it costs the spammers but just how much of the total internet bandwith is taken by these billions of spams messages sent out daily.

The worst part was mentioned by Al how they hack into sites and servers, computers, email accounts and send their spam from there.

I do my part against it by reporting as much as I can and by using Akistmet, etc on my sites but as long as it is profitable by these people they will continue to do it the same way drug dealers and other criminals do.

I doubt they will ever go away, but every little bit helps.

So you mean this Prince that sent me that email last night is not real? SOB ! ...im screwed now !

But I did use pay-payl so maybe they will refund me ....what do you guys think?

I should of known better, this Prince's IP was from the Ukraine !

My Prince is from Nigeria and I am still hoping he is real. :D Geez that didn't sound right. :eek:

Well...lol..Ukrainians are hot ...wait.....oh snaps ! :erm:

Off topic posts removed.