Archive of the Relief Scam Mailing List

In order to maintain a level of privacy from public scrutiny and harassment to the persons reporting these spams, scams, and possible scams, access to this archive has been restricted to Law Enforcement and News Media personnel, and others known and trusted by the archive maintainer as reliable sources of forwarded data or have other legitimate interests.

To obtain access, contact postmaster@stopspam.org. You must give a reliable contact address consistent with those requirements, and be willing to agree to the terms of nondisclosure of personal data of the forwarding individual(s), except in the case of Law Enforcement personnel using the data in the course of their legitimate investigations.

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    Information for General Public Visitors

    As always, in the times of tragedy, the slime crawls out from under the rock within minutes, hours and days of the horrific tragedies that affect others, seeking to profit by others' grievous losses. In this case, a multitude of scams, spams, and just plain bad taste marketing began appearing within hours of the tragic and cowardly attack on our nation. The sheer audacity and temerity of those who perpetrate these scams, hoping to profit by the outpouring of emotions of those wishing to "do something" to help, is appalling.

    At this time, we are seeing 4 main categories of abuse stemming from the terrorist attacks on September 11, appearing within hours of the events. In order from least despicable to most despicable, we classify them as follows:

    1. Bad Taste Marketing - where marketers attempt to use the desire to help, or the fear of the unknown or similar incidents, to further their own marketing ends, whether they claim that portions of the proceeds are going to charity or not.
    2. Unsolicited Bulk Email with legitimate information - using an inappropriate means, UBE, or "spam," to distribute information pointing to legitimate websites, information services, and legitimate donation sites. Even in tragedy, UBE is theft of resources of others, and is inappropriate.
    3. "Click-through" scams, where the owner of a website profits by putting banner ads or click-through links that point to information people are desperately seeking, or to sites with scams on them. These people profit every time someone comes to their web page, or clicks on one of their links (these work variously). Also known as "pennies-per-click."
    4. Direct Collect scams, where the owner has set up a "donation fund" or other cash generating site with the claim that the proceeds will be donated to [often undisclosed] charities, such as the Red Cross.

    The Red Cross, in particular, has been a favorite target for many of those running scams, mainly because of the name recognition involved. The Red Cross has released a statement that recommends that someone wishing to donate to their relief effort should rely on one of only four secure locations to do so and be sure that it does get to the Red Cross: The Red Cross website itself, www.redcross.org, or one of the only three authorized partners in collecting donations; AOL.com, amazon.com, or yahoo.com. All three of these authorized partners have prominent links on their main pages to help you to donate. Anyone else displaying the Red Cross banner and/or claiming to take donations for them may not be legitimate - be very careful. Not only do the scam artists gain from you when you get taken, but the real victims lose that help. It's a sick world where people prey on others in this manner. In the words of the Seargent on the old TV show, Hill Street Blues - "Hey!! Let's be careful out there!" Know who you are donating to.

    To those wishing to report these spams, scams, possible scams, and bad taste marketing relating to the terrorist attacks - whether received by email, usenet, postal mail, phone or other method, please report them to reliefscam@stopspam.org. ONLY spams, scams, suspected scams, and bad taste marketing relating to the terrorist attacks are of interest. Please include complete headers of electronic messages whenever possible. You will probably receive no reply directly unless further data is required. Your forwarding personal information will remain with the information so that Law Enforcement (primarily) and News Media personnel may contact you for further information. By submitting a spam, scam, possible scam, or an example of bad taste marketing to the above address, you hereby agree to that disclosure to those individuals and others on the real-time distribution list and with web-archive access, as defined above. Please be aware that the ONLY other individuals that will be able to access the information are known to be trustworthy and we have extremely high confidence that they will not abuse any contact information you give - all are anti-spam... you won't get spammed because of this.

    A personal (and professional) plea... Please do not fall prey to the forwarding of chain letters, or other "pass this to your friends" type of letters - there's no reason to pass along information that is going to be passed dozens of times and is easily available many other locations anyway, and may actually be completely or partially unreliable - all you are doing is perpetuating chain letters and "urban legends" - many of these chain type letters circulating have no basis in fact - just because we all feel the need to do something does not mean that "anything" is necessarily equivalent to "something." Don't feel "I must do something - this is something, therefore I must do it." You can best help this country by continuing with your lives as best as possible consistent with prior to the attack - the more we change our lives, the more the terrorists have won.

    Note: We already have enough copies of the following [these may be any or all of the following: spam with legit information, scams, possible scams, or bad taste marketing using the tragedy to further sales... inclusion in this list does not attempt to pass a legal judgement on the content, merely that we already have copies in our archive and no further copies are needed. This is definitely not a complete list]: