Telemarketing and Internet Frauds

I'm sure that there are many other list like this, but, I decided to add my own...

TELEMARKETING FRAUD

To opt out of telemarking calls, go to http://donotcall.gov The US government and US telemarketers are supposed to enforce this list as of Oct 1, 2003. Ya right,
I'm not holding my breath. However, I entered my phone numbers in it and I will see what happens after Oct 1.

I thought that it was illegal to use robotic dialers playing recorded messages for commercial telemarketing. I've been getting hit with a ton of them lately mostly for:

Trips to Walt Disney. I actually pushed "1" to talk to an live operator who hung up on me when I asked for their address.
Trips to Las Vegas
Reduce your high interest loads (I don't have any). These come from "Jeffery" at 800-990-3990 every couple of days

A fraud that I fell for:
I got a call from the Virginia Coalition of Pollice and Deputy Sheriffs. They are using phone list of business owners and asking them to help the community. They say that they are a 501-C charity helping the local police. They also claim that by displaying their sticker on your car you may get out of speeding tickets (of couse I thought that this was probably not true, but what the heck). I volunteered to donate some money. Can you image my surprise when the "bill" arrived and it stated in small letters at the end of the invoice that VCPDS is NOT a charity! I did not send them any money, and they have now sent me a "Late Notice"! Screw them! I started investigating VCPDS and they are some kind of little money making organization that has a little web site hosted by a local dial up ISP (they don't even have their own domain). Their site is at http://users.erols.com/vcops/vcopmain.html (last updated in 1997). I feel like such a fool, oh well.

INTERNET FRAUD

A large list of SPAMMERs and other evil people is located at http://www.unixhub.com/block.html

And, then there is SPAM. Why in the world are people buying stuff from these idiots? Ed Kohler sent me an interesting email. He investigated a SPAMMER that claimed to increase your web site's hit rate. Ed is probably interested in this because his company does web work (and sort of the same thing). However, his write up is pretty good. His write up is at:
http://www.haystackinaneedle.com/news/200308-keyword-property-center.htm (oh god, he's using Microsoft products. The CORRECT file type is HTML!! Oh well..)