Scams, spams overwhelm victims

Rotorua victims of scammers and spammers are being warned not to try to get revenge.

"Leave them alone" is the best advice one Rotorua expert has for locals sick of having their computers, faxes and letterboxes clogged with scams and spam.

In the past year or so Rotorua woman Stella Seymour has received 42 Nigerian bank scam by faxes, three chain letters and countless emails from people "trying to steal my money".

"I have had to unplug my fax machine because they were sending them all through the night."

Mrs Seymour says she'd love to get back at the culprits but Adam Dunkerley, general manager of Rotorua information technology company Need A Nerd Ltd, says there's really no way to stop them. Trying to get back at them could be trouble. "I would recommend you leave them alone," he said. "They want you to contact them and if you start trying to get back at them they can cause you a lot of problems."

Mrs Seymour, a retired private investigator, got so fed up with unwanted mail she started faxing rude messages back to the senders.

"The numbers just didn't exist. I emailed the FBI in America - they have a website to report this kind of stuff - but I did not hear back from them."



Mrs Seymour said her father-in-law "very nearly" responded to a Nigerian scam.

"They promised to bank millions of dollars into his bank account if he provided the bank details and $45.

"They would have done well out of him but we picked it up before he did it.

"Once he sent his bank account details that would have been the end of it."

Mrs Seymour said a friend of her father-in-law did respond to a scam and lost almost $80,000.

Mr Dunkerley said email was one of the most efficient communication methods available but was misused on a huge scale by spammers.

"Why? Because it works. Most of us ignore the products on offer but if a spammer gets even a 0.01 per cent response from 10 million emails, that's 1000 sales," Mr Dunkerley said.

He said email spam also added extra costs for service providers.

"Extra bandwidth is needed to cope with the email traffic and extra staff are needed to combat spam and deal with spam-affected customers. These costs inevitably end up added to our end-user charges."

STOP SPAM: Set your email programme up to automatically filter spam

Install software that lets you check emails before they come into your inbox

If you use chatrooms, create an address you can delete if it attracts too much spam

Don't forward chain letters, even if they say the consequences will be dire - they won't be

When filling out forms make sure you tick the "don't pass my details on" box