Avoiding Scams, Hoaxes And Urban Legends

A popular subject within the internet today is all about avoiding scams, hoaxes and urban legends. Here are a number of ways to avoid some of the perils connected with being in touch with the rest of the world via the internet . As a general rule, watch out for any offer that sounds too good to be true, it usually is.. This is applicable to products being offered on the Internet and especially to any unsolicited offer or spam you receive within your email. Most of them are scams. The phrase "spam", in case you don't know, refers to any unsolicited bulk email. If it isn't addressed to you personally, or you do not recognize the sender, or you're being asked to buy something or pass on questionable information, then this is spam. My advise is always to "can the spam" immediately by deleting any email you receive from anyone you do not know.

The perfect way of avoiding spam, is by being very cautious about who you give your email address to. My advise here is to set up a free email account and to give this email address to anyone you don't absolutely trust with all of your individual information. It almost never does any good to fight back against spam. Your best plan is just to delete any unwanted email. A trick that continues to be pretty successful for me is to set up an email rule (or filter) that automatically sends any mail not addressed to me straight to a special folder. Most of this is spam and can be easily disposed of.

As well as spams and scams, the other thing to watch out for on the Internet is hoaxes, urban legends and false information. There are many of these floating all around the Internet these days. Watch out for any email that asks you to send money for some cause, or to forward the email to all of your friends. Just about all of these are hoaxes. Another category of hoaxes involves virus warnings. If you receive information which suggests you can get a computer virus from doing anything except opening an email attachment or running an application, then this also is probably false information.

Most computer viruses are spread by users opening email attachments that contain the virus. You should never open an eMail attachment unless you are expecting one. Even if you know the sender, make sure that the attachment is legitimate before opening it. It is very much safer to delete any questionable attachments and get the sender to resend them than to assume the sender intended to send that email.

Your best defenses against computer viruses are:

1) Caution in downloading programs from questionable sources.

2) Regularly scanning your drive with virus protection software.

3) Backing up all of your important data to another drive or media (floppy, Zip or CD-ROM) as regularly as possible. By doing all of these, if your system does get infected, you can restore it with the minimum of fuss.