Matthew Gates http://www.scamshare.com 2m 615 #scamshare
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
ScamShare: Combating Scam By Sharing Scams
A while ago, we covered scam emails that Confessions of the Professions receives quite often. The world is filled with scams and most emails sent everyday are scam emails. Why do they keep sending them and why is it not stopping? The scam business is a billion dollar industry. Scamming one person might mean the scammer could swipe a few hundred to a few thousand dollars from one person’s bank account. Add in a couple hundred people who fell for the scam and you have a full-blown business and people making profit on the suffering of other’s misery.
In order to combat this and try and help against the fight against spam, as a web developer, I built a free web app called ScamShare that allows anyone to submit their scam stories, scam emails, scam phone calls, and scam text messages to the website in order to contribute your information and prevent future scams. The more types of scams that can be exposed and found on a search engine query, the less likely the chance of scammers scamming people in scams. Almost every email that is sent might sound too good to be true as most of these emails are fake. No matter how convincing they sound, and some of them sound a lot better than they used to, as these people are learning to speak English better and come up with more elaborate stories, they are not real and every one of them is trying to steal something about you, specifically your bank account information or identity.
People who are likely to be scammed:
- White men
- Older people
- Younger people
- Living in Florida
- Lonely
- On the Internet
- Interested and open
- In debt
- Desperate
- Human
Top countries where scams are most common:
- Latvia and Nigeria
- Egypt
- United States
- Mexico
- Ukraine
- Hungary
- Malaysia
- Colombia
- Romania
- Philippines
The most common types of scams:
- Nigerian (419) Scam
- Work At Home Scam
- Gold and Silver, Bars and Coins
- Money Order Overpayment
- Lottery
- Ponzi Scheme
- Ebay Sellers Not Shipping
- Phishing
- Contractor Scam
- Fake Software or Software with Malware
- Land Bankers
- Phony Psychics
- Natural Disaster Scams and Charities
Analyzing the keywords of 98 scam emails sent to our email address, these were the amount of times they appeared:
- bank 271 times
- fund 258 times
- money 174 times
- name 165 times
- payment 141 times
- account 114 times
- email 114 times
- card 101 times
- address 100 times
- atm 89 times
- million 85 times
- information 84 times
- help 77 times
- africa 72 times
- god 67 times
- phone 66 times
- work 64 times
- beneficiary 59 times
- delivery 54 times
- nigeria 51 times
- transaction 48 times
- investigation 41 times
- united states 39 times
- foreign 39 times
- compensation 38 times
- attention 38 times
- inherit 37 times
- federal 35 times
- fraud 34 times
- partner 34 times
- legal 34 times
- company 32 times
- department 30 times
- document 29 times
- trust 27 times
- business 26 times
- deposit 25 times
- economic 25 times
- charity 23 times
- bureau 23 times
- western union 22 times
- washington 21 times
- commission 21 times
- international 21 times
- republic 20 times
- crime 20 times
- withdraw 18 times
- child 18 times
- opportunity 18 times
- winning 16 times
- fbi 16 times
- representative 16 times
- lord 15 times
- private 14 times
- lottery 13 times
- friend 13 times
- institution 12 times
- division 11 times
- decision 11 times
- settlement 10 times
- money gram 10 times
- foreign 9 times
- customer 8 times
- approval 7 times
- identification 6 times
- treasury 6 times
- billion 5 times
- balance 5 times
- proof 5 times
- debt 5 times
- won 4 times
- authority 4 times
- stolen 4 times
- danger 3 times
- consent 2 times
We created ScamShare as a community where people can share information and help prevent future scams. The more exposure these scams have, the less likely the chance of any of these scams being successful. There is no sign up and you remain completely anonymous. Other than installing Google Analytics, we do not record any other information about you. If you are interested, please join our community and start sharing your spam and scam emails to help others become aware of the types of scams being sent.
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