BEWARE OF SCAMS

This post was submitted by Norman Kurland, a member of the Issues Committee of our Club.

During these years of rapidly rising healthcare costs, especially for drugs, for which the Bush administration has refused to negotiate prices, many people, not just seniors, are searching for alternative sources for prescription drugs. Norman was one such person whose online search resulted in his being scammed. For the naive among us "scam" is a verb/noun widely used in internet terminology meaning "fraud". In Norman's words "I was recently scammed and distributed the scam until two of the recipients exposed my error. I won't repeat the scam--it was on drug costs--but here are some sites to use to keep you from also becoming a victim.

The easiest path to follow is to go to Google and type in "internet scams" in the search box, click Search and you will have access to 2,170,000 sources on the subject. Don't panic! Of these, the first page of sources, 10 in total, are probably all you will ever need to protect yourself from being scammed. These sources are: http://www.scambusters.org/; www.fbi.gov/majcases/fraud/internet; www.hotscams.com/; www.hoax-slayer.com/; http://www.snopes.com/; http://www.fraud.org/; and a few others. Many of these sources have links that will transfer the reader to specific types of fraud or areas of fraud, like drugs.

To be safe rather than sorry remember that if an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is just that. If you are suspicious of an e-mail that has been forwarded to you or if the e-mail ends by asking you to forward it on to other people, that is a tip-off that a hoax is involved." Thanks, Norman, for keeping us on our toes and out of trouble.

P.S. If you have never received an e-mail from a lawyer in Lagos, Nigeria telling you that a civil engineer with your last name was killed in an auto accident in 2001 and to claim the $1 million in his Nigerian bank account, please reply post-haste blah, blah, blah. Raise your hand!