Dangers of chain letters, likes and shares

Do you ever wonder why people want you to forward email?

Do you ever wonder why people want you to click Like or Share?

Do we (as individuals) make money on the like or the shares?

Before Facebook, we had chain letters that went around in E-mail. They would have cute pictures or cute sayings. On the bottom of the message, it would have a message to get you to forward the email. Here are a few of the many different messages

• Forward this to 10 people and you will have good luck

• Forward this to 10 people and you will be blessed or will get money

• If you don't forward this, you will have bad luck or some other problem

• If you don't forward this, you don't love God

To me the above statements are an insult. I have to forward if I love God. You mean I can't love God if I don't?

The reason for the chain letters is that the spammers want to collect email addresses. Spammers know that people will forward cute sayings and pictures. When people forward an email, it also forwards all the email addresses that is in the email. If the sender sends the email to 6 people, There will be 6 email addresses available for hackers and spammers to get. Those 6 forwards the emails to 6 others than you have over 50 email addresses available for hackers and spammers to collect. If the email continues to be forwarded, the number of email addresses available grows tremendously. this is why some people's email gets full of spam.

I am not saying you can't forward emails that you like. I am saying that you should protect yourself by forwarding it the safe way. Here is some tips

1. Do not use your primary email address to forward the email. You can create tons of email addresses. Use one that if it gets spammed, you could care less because you don't use it for regular correspondence. For example, create one like forwardedemail@email.com. The people you do regular correspondence with will know to email you at a different email address.

2. When you forward the email, delete all the email addresses showing up in the body so spammers and hackers won't see them.

3. In the TO field, put your email address in it that you are using to send this email. As in example on 1, put forwardedemail@email.com in the TO field. Everyone you forward the email to will see this email but it doesn't matter because they will have that email anyways because you sent it.

4. Put everyone's email in the BCC field. BCC is Blind Copy. No one will see your email address if it is in here. Click here for more information on BCC. Click here for the difference between TO, CC and BCC fields

 

Now that we have Facebook, you see the following

• Click Like if she is beautiful, hit share if you wish cancer never exist. Keep scrolling if your a heartless *)**)&

• Facebook will donate a $1 for every share

• list goes on and on

Spammers get money for collecting names on the shares and likes. Facebook does also. I know some will say that Facebook doesn't make money from the spammers but if that is true, Facebook could stop all the spam by doing one thing. If Facebook would change the likes and shares to show the number of people that shared or liked it but didn't show your name, that would end the spammers reason for spamming, but Facebook will not do that. Why? because they make money on it.

I do click like and share on a few things such as friend's personal pictures and sayings. If I see a cute saying or picture that has not originated from my friends but somewhere in Facebook, I save the picture and upload it to Facebook instead of sharing or liking it.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 has a great tool to save pictures and text from the screen to your computer called the Snipping Tool. Click here for more information on it.