Everyone has experienced spam. Here we are not discussing the widely ambivalent opinions of the meat in a can, but rather the random messages to any sort of messaging center. You have probably opened up your email, and found yourself flooded with messages; either you insanely popular over night, or you have been the victim of copious amounts of spam. These messages can sometimes be completely obvious, such as a strangely titled email with many symbols with only an enigmatic assortment of oddly juxtaposed letters and numbers, something right out of the Matrix. This message was probably generated by some two bit hacker (no pun intended) using an old computer who just happened to actually hack into a system correctly, yet failing on actually sending the message. While hackers often spam people, keep in mind that anyone at any time can email anybody, so anybody is a viable victim of spam. You could do it yourself; make a message full of random stuff and send it to all of your friends and other recipients. Although it make ostracize you from virtual contact with your friends, it is the principle of the matter; anybody can spam.

Spam for most is just an annoying obfuscator when surfing through their emails; with Pavlovian dog like conditioning, they simply delete these emails as they come in. This is the reality though, as most spam blockers featured on many email hosts only block messages from companies, not sovereign people. These spam emails can be much more dangerous than anyone thinks though, and this is where the skilled hackers thrive.  Your Internet provider will tell you never to reply to a spam message, but what if you didn’t know this? Imagine yourself a youth, just beginning to use the Internet. You establish an email account, and inevitably receive your first pieces of spam to fill your inbox, claiming that you are the recipient of a million dollars, all you have to do is give them your social security number and they will do the rest. Or perhaps you are an adult who knows darn well to not open spam. You get that one enticing message, “You have just won a million dollars!” and you know it is probably spam. As is human nature to be interested though, you open it and allow a hacker’s virus to enter your computer, and surreptitiously steal all sorts of information from you. Soon enough you realize that it wasn’t the people who wanted to give money to you, but rather to rob you of every dime you have.

Identity theft is a serious crime in today’s technologically dominated society. People are becoming educated about other ways they are in danger, but they would never expect the benign annoyance of spam emails to be such a potential threat. Do yourself a favor and use a change IP proxy anytime you surf the Internet. This IP changer will change your IP address and disable any hacker or their spam virus emails from following you or stealing any of your information. As far as avoiding spam goes, if it is too good to be true, you probably are not the unexpected winner or receiver of a large fortune.

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