This may be why

I knew this but never thought to post it figuring everyone else knew it to. Someone sent it to me in an email today and the lightbulb came on!

Being a marketer I knew I could have had my way with every email address that people forwarded to me. I even had software to extract them!

But didn’t…… Just couldn’t bring myself to do it…..  I would have even been nice and sent an optin request and never sent another thing if they didn’t opt in ….. but I didn’t!

Must be the Vermonter in me…….

I could not believe the people that were puttting their friends and families email addresses out for the scum of the earth to take advantage of. I used to reply with a warning but few took heed. Now I am Just letting you all know it can and is done every day.

The best way to protect everyone (you never know what could be in these "forward" emails anyway!) is to copy and paste (without formating) to a new email. This will stop the email address collection cycle most of the time.

1) Any time you see an E-Mail that says forward this on to ‘10′ of your friends sign this petition, or you’ll get bad luck, or whatever, it has either an E-Mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and E-Mails of those folks you forward. The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of ‘active’ E-Mails to use in SPAM E-Mails, or sell to others that do.

2) Almost all E-Mails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards. All it was, and all any of this type of E-Mail is, is a way to get names and ‘cookie’ tracking information for telemarketers and spammers – - to validate active E-Mail accounts for their own purposes.

You can do your friends and family members a favor by sending this information to them; you will be providing a service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting thousands of Spam E-Mails in the future!

If you have been sending out (FORWARDING) the above kinds of E-Mail, now you know why you get so much SPAM!

Do yourself a favor and STOP adding your name(S) to those type listings regardless how inviting they might sound! You think you are supporting a GREAT cause, but you are NOT in the long run. Instead, you will be getting tons of junk mail later in life!

Also: E-Mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other organization. To be acceptable, petitions must have a signed signature and full address of the person signing the petition. Read the full story here: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/internet.asp "

Yup! I know they got me! What a sales page and just what I have been looking for, an autoresponder I can offer members free or very low cost access to.

All of this time I thought I could see these scams a mile away…..had hardened myself to do my do diligence first….. don’t buy on the spot.  But they still got me!

It could be worse, I shut down my PayPal just in case But they got my business PayPal addy for their "PayPal only list"! No I did not go for the Backend purchase which was getting your autoresponder signup form link on their page for only another $39! The traffic stats I saw were not worth $39 for that shotty page….. They sure put all of their money into their salespage.

By this time I had smartened up ……anything I have to send an email to both the Admin and my sponsor or salesman Before I get the product sends up red flags that even the best product that I need right now can not over ride! But that was to late….

I will go through with the rest of the process to see if they are only building their "PayPal Addy Lists" probably to sell or are after peoples PayPal accounts. Hopefully I will only have good news to report…. like I did recieve my autoresponer software and I only got messages from the Admin and my salesman. It would be nice to think these guys were actually only trying to help people build their own lists and a little cash flow while taking their cut for building this system.

As Transparent as their system is …. I would hope not! They need some marketing training…… good sales page but after that it looks like a scam…. I will let you know…

I want to make it clear that I am not the author of this article. I forgot the blog says I am when I post unless I change it.

Thank You Charles & Susan Truet for sharing this with us.

We don’t use E-gold very often since most of our online business and customer sales are conducted through our online merchant account. However, we occasionally have someone who will request paying by E-gold so we keep an account there for this reason. Once a month or so we withdraw the funds and decided to do so yesterday. Imagine our dismay when we logged into our E-gold account yesterday and found our balance to be a big fat ZERO! We had checked the balance just a few days ago so we knew this was not correct. After investigating the history of the account, we found that a spend had been made to another e-gold account user WITHOUT our knowledge or authorization. We had been hacked!

Since we have up to date anti-virus and firewall software on our computer, we assumed we were safe. Not so! It seems this is not enough to keep away the hackers as the software does not prevent “Spyware” from being installed on your computer.

“Spyware” is software that gets onto your computer and literally “spies” on your activities. The spying can range from relatively harmless use of cookies tracking you across multiple websites… to extremely dangerous “keystroke loggers” which record passwords, credit cards, and other personal data. That data then gets relayed to the person who put the software on your computer.

Spyware gets on your computer in one of several different ways.

First, it rides along with software you download from the ‘Net and install on your system.

Second, they come as email attachments (much like viruses) and automatically install themselves on your computer when you open the email message.

Third, hackers find an open port on your computer and use the “back door” to install basically anything they want.

And fourth, the more malicious types, like keystroke loggers, can even get installed by someone with direct physical access to your computer such as an employer, suspicious spouse, business competitor, or someone who wants to know exactly what you’re doing.

So how do you protect yourself against these malicious hackers? You need a program that specifically scans your system for the tens-of-thousands of existing spyware programs along with the new ones appearing daily.

Below are two programs which specifically check for and remove spyware from your system:

“Spybot Search & Destroy” – www.safer-networking.org
“Ad Aware” – www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/

You may have spyware lurking on your computer right now so protect yourself today by downloading one of the above programs!

As a point of reference, we contacted E-gold and informed them that we had been hacked. We provided them with the account number of the person who received the funds and asked for a contact e-mail address on the person. E-gold informed us that they could not provide that information without a “court order” and that basically there was no way of getting the money back!

Take action today to protect yourself from this growing threat! The bottom line is: – Keep your anti-virus program current

- Install a firewall
- Carefully screen software before installing it
- Scan specifically for spyware weekly
- Stay current on this growing threat.

About the Author:

Charles & Susan Truett are experienced internet marketers
who have built a successful online business and are now
teaching others how to achieve the same success. For more information on how to make money at home visit:
www.partnersinsuccess.net