I received the following email about an hour ago. The sender’s name as it appeared in my inbox is Agent Thomas Green. The name is obviously a common name and a simple Google Search will reveal that this email has already done quite a few rounds. The Subject of the email is ‘Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)’. When I received the email, I opened it because I wanted to ensure it wasn’t from a customer who had lodged a complaint (which would have been a first ever). I couldn’t stop laughing when I opened it, and I knew I had to post it here because it is worth reading, and learning from!

Federal Bureau of Investigation
J. Edgar Hoover Building
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20535-0001

From: Agent Thomas Green
Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)

(IC3 accepts Internet crime complaints from either the person who believes they were defrauded or from a third party to the complainant.)

My name is Agent Thomas Green of the FBI, I’m using this medium to inform you that we recieve a complaint about some internet frauds attempt which involves you and some culprit. Your complain has been reviewed and approved for immediate actions.

After our thorough scrutiny, we realise that you have been defrauded in one way or the other by some people claiming to have huge funds waiting for you. Some of the culprits reside in your country while some are outside of your shore. We have so far arrested atleast 6 people involved in these schemes and further investigation is still in progress.

Meanwhile, the FBI compensation department has agreed to refund a partial amount of the money recovered from the culprit totalling the sum of US$250,000.00 (Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand US Dollars) to be returned to you. To avoid any illegal/fraudulent act, these money has been preloaded into an ATM card for your own conveniences and you can cash it at any ATM machine in your country.

To utilize your claim, we request that you provide the following information for proper filing:

Your full name:_____________________
Your mailing address:_______________
Your mobile number:_________________

Fill appropriately and send to our paymaster via email:

Agent Fredy Simon
e-mail: fredysimon@aol.com

For security reasons, your Personal Identification Number (PIN) code has not yet been activated until your final review.

Best regards,

Agent Thomas Green
Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

While I post this here, I want you to know that I know at least 3 instances where people have fallen prey to this Nigerian scam and lost their money. They feel bad not because of losing money only but more because they were well educated and knew that there is no dead relative, old banker, Iraqi General or Oil Baron who would leave money for them.

Greed!

To-Do after installing WordPress – Maintenance

On March 23, 2009, in Tech Gyan, by shashank

This post is in continuance from the previous post, which was about customizing the visual appearance of the WordPress blog. After I finished ensuring the my blog was looking fairly good, I moved on to combat the next biggest problem with WordPress – Comment Spam.

Any blog, which has a good Google Page Rank, suffers from trackback and comment spam. There are various marketers who find this as the easiest way of improving their link popularity and getting free traffic. The best way to get rid of this spam is to activate the Akismet plug-in, which is included by default with the WordPress installation. From the Akismet website:

Akismet is a contraction of Automattic Kismet. Our favorite definition of kismet is "Kismet (principle), the magnetic attractive force that actualizes the playing out of karma; often used in the positive sense."

Use of Akismet requires a key, which can be obtained by registering for an account with WordPress.com. The plug-in is good to go after its activated, however advanced users may change settings to please their geek nerves.

The only other thing required now, before actually starting to write to the blog, is to ensure that the Search Engines can find the blog easily and they can also index it well. WordPress has 2 popular plug-ins, All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps Generator. These two plug-ins also work out-of-the-box. There are no changes required, however options are available if you want to customize them.

With this done, the blog is ready for posts. I guess there are a few more customizations and optimizations that are possible and we can discuss them in the posts to come. Do write in if you have any suggestions or best practices.