Scammed and spammed

Since I logged in last week, I’ve recieved about 2000 comments, well, by coments I mean spam comments. I’m hoping that if anyone did leave a comment it would have gotten though my gmail filters and was approved, if not my apologies. I don’t know what’s going on, I used to never recieve this much usless traffic.. I guess it’s all that talk about enlarging my… heheh.

More bad news, and an unfortunate renewed confirmation in my own naivity is that I have been scammed. That last post I had about how easy it is to give to charity. I was wrong, charity isn’t that simple it seems. The Polio Fellowship of Ireland bag that I filled up with all sorts of new or previously loved items was actually an elaborate hoax. Luckily however, just last week two people were arrested by gardai after calls from over 50 suspicious house owners. I only wish I had been one of them. According to soapbox ireland, this is the first time the name of an established charity such as the Polio Fellowship has been used. At the moment, these bogus charities cannot be outlawed as even though they present themselves as charitable organisations they do not explicitly mention it on their bags/stickers. It’s only illegal for an organisation to describe itself in terms which “could cause members of the public to reasonably believe that it is a charitable organisation”. Are there any other well known scams going on out there that I should know about? I’m wondering if I should start my list ot 101 things to give away to charity again, after all these months I’ve given away 82 items.. I wonder how many of them are just making some lowlife a couple of bucks and how many actually went towards a good cause. What do they do with all this stuff anyways? I guess I’ll never know.

Submit Article :- BlinkList + Blogmarks + Digg + Del.icio.us + Ekstreme Socializer + Feedmarker + Furl + Google Bookmarks + ma.gnolia + Netvouz + RawSugar + Reddit + Scuttle + Shadows + Simpy + Spurl + Technorati + Unalog + Wink

Posted in: 101in1001, Learning

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 5:38 pm and is filed under 101in1001, Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Scammed and spammed”

UberAlex February 2nd, 2009 at 5:47 pm

Are you using Akismet on this blog? (is it wordpress?) It’s caught nearly 80,000 spam comments on one of my sites.

There’s a web site dealing with some of the scams that go on here: http://clothingcollection.org/

I think you should keep your total at 82, after all, you intention was there and it was not your fault.

Chris February 2nd, 2009 at 6:01 pm

I heard of these scams before. Apparently they are becoming more common in Ireland.

Have a look at this article: http://www.icsa.ie/icsa/Main/NewsArticle-SundayTribune.htm

Sorry to hear you were scammed =(

TheChrisD February 2nd, 2009 at 8:32 pm

Two thousand spam in a week? Wow. I’ve only caught over 2500 in the whole two years of my site…

Although I’m not sure whether it’s counting those spam it auto deletes on old posts…

mollydot February 3rd, 2009 at 6:05 pm

I gave stuff to those scammers too, before I knew to look out for them. Don’t blame yourself.

I think they sell the stuff (possibly even exporting clothes to African countries, fulfilling the “needy in Africa” bit of some claims, otherwise maybe just to the rag trade) and keep the money.

Leave a Reply