I spent many years living in Manhattan. But I’ve spent nearly a decade in Los Angeles and my first 17-18 years right here in Chicago. Plus a bunch of trips to other places. But many it’s my life as a big city resident that’s allowed me to see a lot of crime. One of the weird things about crime is the aftermath. If you’ve ever seen some guy sitting on the curb being propped up by a cop and/or paramedic you know what a guy who was just mugged looks like. If you’ve ever strolled down a seedy side street in the Lower East Side in NYC or someplace like Gower or Bronson next to Hollywood and Vine then you’ve probably seen tons of used condoms on the ground, so you know what street prostitution looks like. And so it goes

So a few months back I wrote this piece for this blog about people trying to Phish MySpace users. Phising is trying to con people on the internet to GIVE you their information voluntarily by fooling them. I mean there are tons of cons that involve technology. Years ago I was crazy into reading about the exploits of phone phreaks. So I wrote this people to WARN people about some of the phish techniques I discovered within like a week of joining MySpace. I wasn’t surprised by the con men, but I WAS surprised that other MySpace users seemed oblivious, and I was also surprised that MySpace itself didn’t seem to have any kind of warnings that were easy to find (they actually DO have a mention and example but it’s deep in their “Tom” blog).

So I wrote my little piece and I got a few hits. And over time I would add a new trick as I’d stumble across them. And I did that for a while. But the as I watched the statistics of the visitors to the piece I became slowly aware that people looking for the article were NOT people trying to defend themselves but the CON MEN looking for techniques on how to fool/trick/phish/scam MySpace users. What’s the word I’m looking for? Disheartening. Just very disheartening.

Above are just some of the stats from TODAY of these Phisher Kings. Did you notice that international element? Well I noticed too. If I had to estimate, I would say that 99 percent of the people looking for my article are people who want to learn HOW to phish, and only 1 percent are people trying to protect themselves. And of that 99 percent, 90 percent of those people are from places outside America. Yep. We’re being targeted. Plain and simple that’s what’s going on. Now not ALL of them are foreigners. But the American pseudo-criminals are mostly from Southern states. I have no idea what THAT means. But my site gets hits round the clock for people looking to scam MySpace people.

So to get back to what I was talking about at the beginning of this piece, my original article about the phisers shows you evidence of people trying to scam people. In other words you’re seeing the aftermath of the crime. But when I look at the stats and search strings, like you see in the images above, I can actually see the criminals PLANNING the crime. You’re seeing them collecting the ski-mask, gloves and intel about the break-in before they do the job. AND I even had to change one of images in the original article because I could see people were trying to use it to scam more people. Very disheartening.

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Tags: Computers and Internet //