Output Stream of Consciousness

I must admit, a few months ago, we were bandying about the idea of changing our phone number. Why? The incessant barrage of telemarketers and scammers was getting to be too much. They outpaced our actual calls from friends and family by about a 4:1… more »

We got a call from a person wanting to buy a Jeep from us a couple of days back. That seemed pretty odd, but hey, wrong numbers happen. Then it kept happening. No huge influx, but 3-4 calls per day. I was home for one today, and decided to ask them… more »

A hearty thank you to the folks who do my hosting for catching this. A hacker or script kiddie managed to upload a somewhat nasty-looking package into my cgi-bin directory. I haven't thoroughly investigated the code yet, but from the looks of it, the… more »

Not content with letting me in on my European lottery winnings, or being a company representative, or helping ousted generals smuggle their money out of foreign countries, they have now outdone themselves with THE DEATH THREAT. Full text and very slig… more »

Just poking a quick heads-up here, since this particular scam isn't being caught by some anti-phishing filters. It's entitled "PayPal Resolution Center - Remove Account Limitations", and it points here. You get the typical bullshit that phishers use t… more »

Online IQ tests are ever so much fun, especially when you do well in them, especially after someone issues a challenge. Such was the case with the popular IQ Test on Facebook. Nevertheless, there was one question I didn't like - I've taken many such t… more »

Here's the text of the scam: Royal Bank of Canada Dear customer, Due to the recent upgrade of our servers, we have issued this warning message. It has come to our attention that some of our customers no longer have access to their banking… more »

We got a small swack of spam comments today which point at pages on http://meta.missouri.edu/ serialize/tmp/@top/ (I've broken up the link here so the spammers don't get more traffic). I've sent the webmasters off a warning. UPDATE: Yay, the pages are… more »

800notes.com is a simple site with but two purposes: letting people post information on persistent, unknown callers, and looking up such posted information. It helped me look up our of our persistent nuisances, 1-800-566-8064, which seems to do cold c… more »

Oh boy - the sources of free money just keep moving around, like some sort of Quantum Leap scenario. Who's got tons of cash and somehow needs me as a willing partner in crime this time? FROM CAPT. MATHEW ZEDWICK, US ARMY FROM BAGHDAD-IRAQ. Reply Ur… more »

I have seen a remarkable decline in the variant of the 419 scam with civil servant/general needing to get millions of dollars out of the country and having chosen you to help with this sub-legal endeavour. The slightly newer take seems to be asking pe… more »

While looking into new users who had joined my forum, I would find plenty that had joined up with many blogs over the past little while. Others were nowhere else to be found on the web, but when I went looking for the domain name in question, I got a ple… more »

More bullshit designed to bilk people out of their money: Dear Western Union Customer, We regret to inform you that your account will be suspended due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the Western Union community. Per the User… more »

After having suffered through a lot of comment spam this past week (not just on my blogs, but on the gardening forums as well), it was nice to reflect on the Secret Service catching Adam Vitale and Todd Moeler, but it's been more interesting to watch wha… more »

Got comment-spammed this morning. Thirty-one comment spams between 4:53 AM and 5:00 AM. I get the sense that my web space provider was been doing some maintenance this morning. I think... I might be pretty thankful for that. Just semi-random crap from te… more »