Are You Receiving Less SPAM?

Spam filters have become much more effective, and all of the major free email services like Gmail and Yahoo have good spam filters. On the other hand, some emails like Plaxo updates, interesting offers or trade association updates can be spam one day and useful the next. Spam will always have a lot of "gray area", and I believe spammers will come back with a vengeance in 2006, with new strategies to avoid the spam detection algorithms. Schemes to force users to identify valid senders will never work, because we always want to receive emails from people we don't yet know...

And the really dangerous spam -- phishing emails -- have gotten much worse in 2005: harder to detect, more insidious. See http://news.com.com/New+phishing+attack+uses+real+ID+hooks/2100-7349_3-5706305.html, for example, and the info at http://www.antiphishing.org/ is very scary.

And identity theft marketplaces have become much more dangerous as well. A couple of months ago, ID Analytics released a very deceptive report claiming that most stolen identity data is never used to conduct identity theft. It would take too long to debunk this report here, but it's important to know that ID Analytics has recent and lucrative ties with credit agencies and other firms whose intent is to prevent new legislation that would force them to give consumers free fraud alerts and credit report freezes, and active notification of credit changes. Also, their claims about the difficulty of selling stolen identities are completely wrong -- it is trivially easy and very profitable to sell and resell stolen ID information again and again. Most frauds are never detected, and the nature of stolen identities is such that the fraud can be conducted months or even years later.

My firm, The Identity Guardian, provides the most comprehensive available protection -- effective prevention, monitoring, insurance, and recovery assistance -- at a cost lower than any major competitor. Google "identity guardian" to find our website, where there's a wealth of additional information, and contact info for follow-up.

Peter