The reality behind so many of these scams...

[Mad Swede]

As authors we often swap tips on how to avoid being scammed. But how often do we give a thought to the reality of what it's like to work in one of the scams?

Like many authors, I’m bombarded by scam fan mail. I wasn’t prepared for what would happen when I wrote back

 

[pmmg]

Yes, I have heard stories of forced labor and all that entails. I would not expect to be able to stop them, or make any of their lives better. But...its still scamming. My policy is just ignore. Blocking and all that is futile and endless anyway.

I had one scammer put a magic pixel in their email, so they got a hit if I even clicked on it. So...they dont even need you to reply to know they got someone on the other end.


From an IT perspective, I dont know why we dont just build our firewalls to block all this countries by default. Why would I ever want anything from China, or Laos, or Nigeria? I should have to go whitelist them, rather than find ways to blacklist them as a standard. Are you listening Cisco and Palo?