[Elecraft] Fraud

[Lynn W. Taylor, WB6UUT]

Seriously folks.

I retired last year after 23 years running an ISP.

Among other things, AOL is a free E-Mail provider, not unlike Hotmail, 
Yahoo or GMail.  They can't afford to invest a whole lot of time and 
staff into policing their service, especially where the only punishment 
they have is to take a free E-Mail address away from someone they can't 
possibly track down.

Signing up for a free E-Mail address is 100% anonymous.

They aren't even going to listen to your claim that the E-Mail address 
is your callsign plus a commonly used prosign, nor are they going to 
agree that "k6mgo" belongs to you in any way at all.

Trying to find someone who will bother to understand  that at any big 
provider is at least as difficult as teaching a pig to sing.

Trying to find someone who cares would be several orders of magnitude 
harder.

They really aren't going to be interested to discover that someone is 
using their service fraudulently -- they already know that.

Welcome to the future of the internet.

On the other side of this, they typical "419 scam" has been around since 
the early 1800's, and they're easy to detect -- you just have to read 
carefully and ask yourself "is this credible."  They almost never are.

I learned most of how to avoid these scams in Jr. High School -- in 
1969.  Yes, there are a few things you can do to test to see if an 
E-Mail is genuine, but it starts with critical reading and asking 
yourself "does this ring true?"

Sorry if that offends everyone.

73 -- Lynn

On 2/6/2014 1:58 PM, Joe Lynch wrote:
> abuse at aol.com
>   
> 73 de Joe, N6CL
>   
>
> ________________________________
>   From: Bill Ross <k6mgo at verizon.net>
> To: Elecraft at mailman.qth.net
> Sent: Thursday, February 6, 2014 12:03 PM
> Subject: [Elecraft] Fraud
>    
>
> Just to follow-up on my post of last night, I tried to notify AOL of the fraudulent use of my name and call on their email list, by sending a email to “fraud at aol’'.com” but it bounced. I had looked on the AOL website but couldn’t find an address to write to for such matters, so I would appreciate it if anyone on the list knows how to contact AOL without having an account there.
>
> Tnx & 73
>
> Bill, k6mgo
>