spam (accepted anglicism that is usually translated by junk mail ) is a growing problem in our society due to, on the one hand, the increased power of the machines and, on the other, the increase in the number of people who send this type of content.
The RAE collects junk mail as the "email of mass distribution and normally advertising or malicious content, which is received without having requested it " and which we often find in our inbox.
In general, spam works as follows.Mass delivery is made to thousands or millions of people, and it is expected to see if some respond.It is the phase fishing (literally fishing).When we answer a junk mail, the scammer (scammer) answers us to try to deceive us of some mode.Sometimes this last step is not necessary, and in fact you try to scam "at the first".
Steal personal data, infect our device with malware , access our checking account, impersonate a family member...the list of crimes is long. How can we get rid of spam ? Is there a way to make the scammers waste their time and their activity is not profitable? Re: scam is an organization that seeks to end spam and despair of scammers, and you can use it to get rid of junk mail.
Problems caused by our friend on spam
The biggest problem generated by spam is the loss of personal time (which we could classify as technological friction), by having to filter the malicious content.mail, we do not know very well who, and we open it to read it.Oops, our bank asks us to access your platform from the email ! (By the way, this is called phishing , or phishing)
This process usually follows a Pareto statistic: 80% of emails go directly to the spam tray and 20% of them are opened.It is with the latter that we have to be careful, because we can be cheated.There are several tips to follow:
- Never access a platform through a link in an email, unless it is the registration email of a service we have just signed up for.A bank never asks to enter from an email , for example.
- Always check the address from which the email comes from.It is possible that someone is impersonating a friend or acquaintance.We can tell by how you write, but it can be difficult.
- If in the email they ask us for something and we think that it is an acquaintance who is behind, it is better to contact this person by other means, such as a phone call.
- If it is an email that supplants identity, denouncing the facts or informing the National Police Corps or the Civil Guard Telematic Crime Group.
Compared to the volume of spam worldwide, there are few who continue to fall into their traps, but these are being renewed and the crimes that are coming will make it difficult for us to differentiate fiction from reality.
How to get rid of spam emails
There are several ways to get rid of targeted spam , those emails that we have not requested but that for some reason have been taken with us.Some companies sell our data to third parties that bombard us with spam.They are legitimate companies and do not seek to scam us, but they are annoying.
- If we have registered but we no longer want to receive the publication (for example, a newsletter), looptimo is to look for the unsubscribe button that comes in the mail itself.
- In the case of publicity of a third party with whom we have not had any relationship, we give some instructions that will harm you in the long term by making use of non-ethical methods.
Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and the bulk of the big email companies have the option of « mark as spam » an email.When this option is done two events occur: the email disappears from our inbox; and we send a notice to the email service to give them the electronic address of the issuer.
Let's imagine that we have received an email from the (invented) account 1989029@qq.com in our inbox.Whether or not a scam, we mark it as spam because we have not requested it; and this same action is carried out by ten users of Gmail, five of Outlook and one of Yahoo.
With this you get that email address goes directly to the spam tray of the following recipients.Surely it has happened to you that someone sends you an email but it reaches you in the spam tray instead of the inbox.Why? Because the system has registered a massive sending activity from that email, and someone has previously cataloged it as spam.
Some antivirus, such as Avast, are integrated with other applications such as Outlook to give a similar option in the mail called « Train as spam ».The procedure is similar.Mail services and antivirus services share common databases to tag emails.
How to use AI Re: scam to eliminate the spam of the world
Sending mass emails to scam people is very affordable.For the cost of a few cents (sometimes not even that), a person can reach millions of inboxes.With an unsuspecting user, without digital knowledge or clueless, the scammer will have already done business.
However, even if this scammer does not dedicate money to your activity, it does take time to, first, design the first mass distribution message to make it tempting and, second, answer the doubts of the possible victims and convince them to do something.Generally, deliver money.
This is where Re: Scam comes in, an artificial intelligence whose goal is to waste time at scammer without him knowing that he is talking to a machine along of an infinite conversation (until the scammer realizes, of course).Up to date, his website boasts of having lost a total of «5 years of time to the scammers ».It is understood, together with all the activity of the different scammers.
How does it work? Just send the email spam to the email address me@rescam.org (if this is real).Once we do, our friend the bot Re: Scam (an autonomous technology) pretend to be us, and he will contact the scammer to unsettle him a little.
For example, if we are asked to send money somewhere in the mail, Re: Scam could ask for detailed instructions on how to do that.When the scammer writes an email (wasting time) and sends it back, Re: Scam will ask again something else, or try to start a conversation, or express doubts, etc.
The ultimate goal is to lose the scammer as much time as possible .Let's think about how serious it would be if everyone used Re: Scam to get rid of spam .Instead of sending the mail to the spam email tray, we get the sender's tray filled with spam .
Since fishing techniques consist of launching spam to millions of people, it is enough that ten, one hundred or a thousand of these people resend the email to me @ rescam.org to fully saturate the spammer , paying you in your own currency, a perfect example of how artificial intelligence can be used as a (defensive) weapon.
Images | Re: Scam, iStock/ALLVISIONN
Comments
Post a Comment