Spam! and all it’s delights.

Each and every day everyone with an email address receives huge waves of junk mail offering all sorts of goodies ranging from viagra (and other pills) to free accident compensation, from loans to delectable offers of earning thousands of dollars for holding some money for a rich Nigerian bank who don’t seem to have their own account.
Some people block spam so never see it, some have become wise to such scams, some only wise to the blindingly obvious ones. Just the other day I saw an email supposedly from PayPal saying that my PayPal account access had been limited due to the fact that someone had tried to access my account which wasn’t me. They then proceeded to ask me if I could scan in my Passport and a recent utility bill or bank statement and email them to security@paypalfraudcheck.co.uk. Maybe being ‘tech-savvy’ helps a bit but who would do such a thing and give ‘PayPal’ details which they don’t even have in the first place?
Have these scams ever worked? On the one hand probably yes as you hear stories of people giving out details to others they have never met and subsequently complaining when they get ripped off. If you are approached in the street and asked to hand over money you would assume you were being robbed and given half the chance you would most likely not hand over your money so why do the same over the internet? This is just one side of the solution to spam however.
The flip side is to prevent scammers getting your address in the first place. This responsibility lies in part with the internet public but also with the sites that we use. If these sites did not make our email addresses available then the scammers would have fewer addresses. Yes scripts can be written to randomly (or systematically) generate email addresses and written well then all addresses can be found but the amount of computing power that would take would probably not be worth the return as the script would run indefinitely.
The simple short term answer to spam? Change your email address and don’t give it out to anyone.