About chain letters and email scams

There is no artificial intelligence that can stand up to human stupidity, at least not right now. Thanks to this, all scammers who send spam get rich

I believe everyone will agree with me when I say that e-mail is one of the most useful applications that the Internet has brought with it. E-mail is very common, easy to use and is often free so that almost everyone who has access to the online world also has such a mailbox.

One of the great advantages of electronic mail compared to traditional mail, apart from its dizzying speed of course, is the ease with which you can send a message to a very large number of other people. If once, in order to send a New Year's greeting to twenty people, you had to risk poisoning as a result of licking the glue of twenty envelopes, e-mail gives you the possibility to send a heartfelt, sincere and personal greeting from heart to heart, to twenty thousand people.

But apart from solving the technical problems of sending a message quickly and to a large number of people, electronic mail did not bring with it any improvement regarding the content of the message. If the content of the message is essential or silly - it doesn't matter to the computer. Some of the messages can be filtered according to certain known content, such as porn spam or running stocks, but all spam filters of all kinds have one weak point that cannot be eliminated: the person sitting in front of the keyboard. Yes, there is no artificial intelligence that can stand up to human stupidity, at least not right now. Scott Adams, the man behind the famous comic 'Dilbert', defined it well: "In the future, a pilot and a dog will sit in the cockpit of the plane. The dog's role will be to watch over the pilot, and if he tries to touch the buttons - to bite him."
In the case of email filtering software, if you've chosen to send a stupid, nonsensical message to ten of your closest friends, there's nothing they can do to prevent it. The software knows, from previous experience, that you and your friends correspond often, and the friend wants to receive mail from you. Therefore, it will not stop the email from reaching its destination, unless you send something truly catastrophic like a computer virus.

Hence there is no real control over the information that goes through the email. The immediate result is the meteoric rise in the amount of chain letters.
Chain letters are not a new thing, and they did not emerge with the advent of the Internet. This strange phenomenon has existed since the nineteenth century. I remember as a child (and no, it wasn't in the nineteenth century) getting a letter or two like this in the mail and being fascinated by them. Not of the content, of course, which was horribly stupid: so-and-so sent this letter to a hundred people and won the lottery. And then he didn't send the letter and a palm tree grew out of his ear. What interested me is what makes people invest the time in writing ten copies of the letter, putting it in envelopes, writing the addresses and paying money for stamps - just because of unfounded and even absurd information they received in a letter from someone they don't know.

In 2004, Jonathan Keats, an American artist and philosopher, received an email from a close friend of his, titled 'Fast Money'. This email was the catalyst for a very interesting research trip by Keats, and an excellent article in Wired magazine from which I took the story.

The email Keats received contained content that I assume a significant percentage of the listeners have already come across before in one version or another. According to the text, Microsoft, together with Intel and AOL, are conducting an experiment aimed at testing the extent of the distribution of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft tracks everyone's emails, and is willing to pay $245 for each email. I mean, if you send the email to ten people, you will receive $2450 from Microsoft - a very respectable amount, considering that all you have to do is just click the Forward button in the mailbox.

When I receive such a letter in my email, I delete it - but Keats did not delete it. Although Keats testified to himself that he uses an Apple Macintosh computer, and therefore there is no chance that he will receive the money from Microsoft, he decided to investigate the matter in depth. He contacted some of the people whose email addresses appeared in the body of the letter as having distributed the letter to other people, and checked if they had already received the money from Microsoft.

No, they didn't. As Abba Eben said at the time, people think logically once they have exhausted all other possibilities. Jonathan Keats did not give up, and asked these people to understand why they sent the letter in the first place. Do they really believe that Microsoft monitors every email they send, and will pay tens of thousands of dollars to people just like that? The answer, in most cases, was the same: 'There is nothing to lose'. Maybe Microsoft will pay, maybe not - worst case scenario, I wasted twenty seconds sending an email.

This way of thinking, which is completely natural and human, leads to really fascinating and amazing results. Keats continued to trace the past of the letter, and finally managed to locate the source: the person who sent the letter the first time - it was in 1997. The writer of the original letter was a software engineering student, who sent the email to a friend as a joke. The friend liked the joke, and sent it on to his friends. They sent it to their friends. As of the beginning of 2008, I am not exaggerating at all if I estimate that this letter has been distributed tens of millions of copies. Do the math for yourself - ten million people, twenty seconds per person: a little over fifty-five thousand working hours that went down the drain, and that's just for one specific letter out of hundreds and thousands of such letters that flood our mailboxes.

And here is another interesting point of view on the chain letters. The I Love You computer virus will go down in history as one of the most common viruses of all time. In 2000, it distributed itself in millions of copies across the Internet, causing enormous financial damage. But today this violent virus, a masterpiece of malicious programming (if you can call it that), no longer exists. It became extinct and disappeared years ago.

On the other hand, the nonsensical chain letter about Microsoft and the money it will pay in billions to all of us has been around for over ten years, and its popularity doesn't seem to be waning over time. This letter achieved a circulation and longevity that a computer virus could only dream of.

How does such a thing happen? What is the secret of the success of these letters? Jonathan Keats's conclusion, after the research he conducted, seems almost imaginary at first glance: the chain letters go through an accelerated evolutionary process, just like the one that all biological creatures go through but much faster. The result of this evolutionary selection is that the most successful letters survive and manage to make new copies of themselves at the expense of the less successful letters.

Here is an example of such evolution in action. In the aforementioned letter appears a signed testimony of a lawyer, confirming (so to speak) the correctness of the information and its reliability. In one of the versions of the letter, the lawyer was replaced with the details of an administrative assistant employed by the American government policy-making agency, who probably accidentally or intentionally got into the letter. The mere mention of an American government agency gave the letter a respectable and credible touch, more people were convinced to pass it on, and this version was widely circulated. You can call this change a successful genetic mutation, if you like.

A bold mention of Intel and AOL in the content of the letter is also the result of a successful coincidence. The original letter contained only Microsoft's name, but at some point in the mists of time, someone incorporated the contents of another chain letter that mentioned Intel and AOL. The new letter, this time with three large companies instead of one, was of course more convincing than its predecessors and more copies were made.

Although the idea that chain letters undergo some kind of evolutionary process sounds far-fetched and unacceptable, it is, in fact, based on well-developed theoretical foundations. The biologist Richard Dawkins, in his fascinating and highly recommended book 'The Selfish Gene', first coined the term MEME in 1976. The MEME is a unit of cultural information, which passes from one human brain to another and is copied over years and generations. A MEME can be almost any information: proverbs, superstitions, traditional customs and much more. The song 'Little Jonathan' is an excellent example of a MEME: our parents sang the song to us when we were children, we sing it to our children and they will sing it to their children and so on. The melody is simple and very catchy, the lyrics are clear and easy to remember - and that's basically all MEME needs: it needs to have features that will allow it to get into our heads easily and stay there long enough for us to pass it on to someone else.

The chain letters, then, are a kind of MEME: they too, like 'Little Jonathan', must have the right qualities to make us decide they are worthy of further dissemination within our cultural framework. In the case of the letter Keats received, greed combined with technological ignorance about the possibility or impossibility of e-mail tracking on the part of Microsoft, are what help it pass from person to person.

Chain letters waste our time and make us look like idiots when it turns out that we fell into a trap, but there are times when they may cause real damage - usually image, and sometimes also financial.

Here in Israel, a pornographic video has been circulating for years, the title of which claims that the star of the film is Yael Bar Zohar, when in fact it is the famous porn star Sylvia Saint. Famous, I mean...that's what they told me. Although it is quite clear from the video itself that it is not Yael Bar Zohar, the email in question continues to pass through our mailboxes and without a doubt is a certain inconvenience to the famous actress who works hard to create a certain image for herself, only to later have her name mistakenly confused with Yael Bar Zohar.

A little more substantial image damage was caused to the fast food chain 'Kentucky Fried Chicken'.
A chain letter dating back to 1999 spread the claim that the restaurant chain had changed its name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC to remove the word 'chicken', chicken or chicken, from its official name. The reason for this, according to the scriptures, is that the chain's restaurants no longer use real chickens, so the law forced the chain to change its name to avoid misleading advertising. Instead of the original winged ones, the letter claims, the chain raises chickens that have undergone horrific genetic engineering: their beaks and legs (which are not edible) have disappeared, the bones in their bodies have been drastically reduced, they have no feathers and they are fed through tubes directly into their veins. The creatures described in the letter are far enough from the original, one might say, to no longer be considered chickens.

For the avoidance of doubt, these are heaps of nonsense. As several sources and former employees of the chain explain, KFC does not raise chickens itself but buys them from farmers who raise chickens, the same birds we all buy at the supermarket.

The success of the chain letter and the large circulation it received is due to the hair-raising descriptions of the poor creatures that were once, perhaps, chickens. This letter plays to us the strings of compassion towards the poor animals, and the strings of fear towards all the fast food and junk companies that they, so to speak, make us sick.

It is difficult to quantify the financial damage caused to KFC as a result of this false chain letter, but such damage was certainly caused. No matter how many press releases the fast food chain issued with denials and explanations, the image in the head of these Frankenstein chickens will not be easily digested and there must be people gullible enough to believe the story. From KFC's point of view, every step you take will only make the situation worse: ignoring it will convey the message that the company may have something to hide, while loud denials will only expose more and more people to the contents of the chain letter.

Another example of the power of fear to contribute to the distribution of chain letters is the hysteria that spread among computer users over the 'Bug 2000' or 'Millennium Bug'. This is a small and insignificant bug that stems from the way dates are stored in computer databases. In some of those databases, the year is recorded, for reasons of economy, with only two digits - for example, the year 1900 will be recorded as 00, and the year 2000 will also be recorded as 00. This causes confusion and giving incorrect and illogical answers when trying to make, for example, a comparison between dates: the computer may make a mistake and think that we mean a date that is a hundred years ago. The chain letters at that time contained dire warnings against prolonged power outages that could be caused by Bug 2000, and possibly even a nuclear holocaust.

It is true that this is a real bug and a problem of some sort when the Ministry of the Interior, for example, tries to calculate whether a senior citizen is entitled to old age pension payments and it turns out that he was just born, but the problem can be solved quite easily and with fairly simple means. Despite this, the dimensions given to the problem, the amount of warnings that appeared online and the attack that 'Bug 2000' received from large organizations - including governments - were blown out of all proportion. The warning letters spoke of general system failure and critical damage. A number of companies were founded based on these concerns to address the problem and reaped quite a bit of profit for almost nothing. Even our Knesset appointed a subcommittee to deal with the issue of 'Bug 2000'.

To this day, I remember those nerve-wracking moments when we all (or some of us) sat in front of the television screens in the last seconds of the previous thousand and watched the state channels that broadcast from broadcasting centers such as the Azrieli Towers and the control room of the Electric Company just to see the disaster that could occur at the moment of the change to the thousand the third. In the end, the fear did not materialize, of course, and no serious damage was caused.

The attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 brought with it a massive wave of chain letters. The e-mail was, in this case, a conduit for the transmission of unverified information and crazy rumors that most of the establishment media refused to give a public platform. Many chain letters contained evidence, so to speak, of a conspiracy by the US government which was itself responsible for the attacks to incite hatred against the Muslim world. In other letters there were accusations that the Jews planned the attack in order to arouse sympathy for Israel in the United States.

One of the most fascinating theories circulating through our mailboxes was the theory that Satan himself was responsible for this great disaster. The proof of this claim was in a photo that has since become very famous. The image shows the Twin Towers after the impact as they are shrouded in heavy smoke, and the thick smoke creates what appears to be an eerie, demon-like face. This image, the supposed proof that the attack on the towers was caused by the intervention of a divine force, opened the floodgates for images of the clouds of smoke from all kinds of angles, and people began to find faces and winged demons in commercial quantities. This imaginary interpretation that many people gave to the smoke, just like the shapes we sometimes see in ordinary clouds in the sky today, teaches us more about the subconscious and human fears than about the attack itself. To quote Einstein, there are only two things that are infinite - the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe.

The 'face in the smoke' image is an example of a very strong driving force pushing the chain letters in recent years. The technological development of fast digital communication has made it possible for users to add pictures and videos to their mail easily, and chain letters containing funny pictures or bizarre videos are perhaps the most common type of such letters today. In most cases, the content of the images or videos is entertaining and harmless, except perhaps for pornographic content that most of us would prefer not to land in our children's mailboxes, for example.

But images and videos 'weigh', in quotes, more than a chain letter that contains only text. A text email, even if it is long, will rarely crack the twenty or thirty kilobytes (or kilobytes) limit of information. An average group of photos or a single video contain three, four or more megabytes, megabytes - thirty times more information that needs to be transferred over the communication infrastructure.

Hence, the load that chain letters create on the computer network of a medium-sized company, for example, is enormous, and can cost the organization a great deal of money in upgrades to the communication equipment and mail servers. The other side of the coin, of course, is that the funny pictures and pornographic videos decently support an entire high-tech industry that develops high-speed communication networks and new information transmission technologies.

The chain letters exploit, as mentioned, known human weaknesses. Computer security experts and psychologists know that one of the biggest problems with the electronic medium is that it prevents us from using natural defense mechanisms we've developed to deal with irrational and exaggerated fears. A text message on the screen provides us with dry information, but does not give us other clues about the hidden intention of the email sender, clues such as body language or tone of voice that we can use to detect a scam or hoax.

Here is an example, also related to the attack on the Twin Towers. One of the most famous photos that passed through the chain letters in the days after the disaster, is a photo in which a young man is seen standing on the roof of one of the twin towers and in the background you can clearly see the plane that is about to hit the building in a fraction of a second. It's a classic 'just before' photo, so powerful and shocking that it's likely landed in almost every mailbox in the world, I think.

If someone were to pull this photo out of their pocket the day after the event, and tell you that they took it themselves - I'm sure most of us would be very skeptical. We would look for signs of a hidden smirk in his body language that would tell us he was teasing us. We would interrogate him day and night about how he managed to take the picture and still get out of the collapsing tower alive, and test his voice for stuttering or other evidence of lying. But e-mail does not allow us to question the image and ask questions. He shows us the image as it is, without interpretations. The result is that a significant part of those who received the photo said to themselves - 'I don't know if this is a real photo or not...but I guess there is every chance that it is real. I will pass it on. It doesn't cost me anything.' In the real world, if you were to pull the photo out of your pocket and show it to your friend and tell him - 'Listen, I met this guy and he told me he took this photo', your friends would probably laugh at you for a long time.

The photo in question, by the way, of the young man and the plane in the background - is an obvious fake. Experts who examined it in depth found dozens of evidences of the photo retouching, including locating the original photo from which the plane was cut - in the original photo it is standing on the runway before take off - and pasted it on the fake photo.

It is also worth mentioning, in this context, an Israeli website that deals with these chain letters and tries quite successfully to sort them out and help surfers decide which of the letters is relevant and which is not. Of course, the vast majority of the letters appearing on the site are Irrelevant.

It is impossible to do a chapter on e-mail scams on the Internet, without referring to a very common scam called the 'Nigerian sting'. The 'Nigerian Sting' is not directly related to the subject of the chain letters, but is an integral part of the email and scams I mentioned.

The 'Nigerian sting' is a scam in the following style: the victim receives an email from a person claiming to be a rich businessman in Nigeria or another third world country. The writer of the letter tells about a large amount of money, usually millions of dollars, that came into his possession through illegal means or that the government is trying to get its hands on money that belongs to him legitimately, such as inheritance money for example. He asks for the help of the recipient of the letter to get the money out of Nigeria without having to pay local taxes and the like, by transferring the millions of dollars to the bank account of the recipient of the letter. Once the money is transferred to the new bank account, the businessman will board a plane and leave Nigeria. In return for his assistance, the wealthy businessman promises a hefty percentage of the money - usually, several hundred thousand dollars at the very least.

In practice, what happens is that in order to transfer the millions between the bank accounts, the businessman asks the victim for an initial amount of money, 'only for the purpose of paying the commission to the bank' or any other excuse. These advances can range from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. Once the victim is tempted to send the money to the businessman, the story is over. The businessman disappeared back into the internet obscurity from which he came, and the gullible was left with a few emails in hand and nothing more.

The reason I dwell on the 'Nigerian sting' is that it is the most common and most profitable scam on the Internet, and its success is mainly due to the same human weaknesses that lead to the success and spread of chain letters. Greed, along with the lack of subconscious cues that allow us to judge whether the person in front of us is trustworthy or a fraud, are the basis for the success of the 'Nigerian sting'.

The 'Nigerian sting' didn't start during the internet boom. This specific scam has been known to us since the nineteenth century, when it was named 'the Spanish prisoner': the fraudster would tell the victim that he was on good terms with a rich noble imprisoned in Spain, and in order to free him and win a handsome return, he asked for an advance payment, etc., etc.

Online, these sting scams started in Nigeria towards the end of the last century. Thousands and tens of thousands of such fraudsters operated from this African country, and studies conducted on this phenomenon speak of frauds amounting to one hundred million dollars a year in the United States alone. This tremendous success naturally brought in its wake a wave of imitators. If you open your mailbox right now, at this very moment, and check the contents of the spam folder - the folder where the emails that the automatic filters assume are spam arrive - you will see at least one or two such letters. They come in different and varied forms - sometimes it's an announcement about a huge win in England's lottery, sometimes an invitation from an Asian banker to invest in some dubious venture that will bring huge profits, and in another case an anonymous 'tip' about one or another stock that is supposedly about to soar on the Azerbaijan stock market.

A word of warning. Do not assume that you, or your family or co-workers are immune to this scam. If someone belongs to a high social class, or has a respected profession or even an intelligent person in general - he is still a human being, and he suffers from the same weaknesses common to all of humanity. Personally, I have already been contacted by two good friends - excellent, smart people who even work in the same field as I do in high-tech - and told me, each one separately, that they were in contact with a businessman who offered them large sums or winning the lottery. If they hadn't told me this by chance, in a casual conversation over a cup of coffee, maybe they too would have fallen into the pit that the scammer dug for them. The only way to prevent this is through education: to establish healthy walls of skepticism and protection against scams, to keep the scammer in his natural place - inside our spam folder.

Falling into the net of such a Nigerian sting has devastating consequences, sometimes. Beyond the financial damage, the defrauded victims also suffer real mental damage. People who have personally experienced the Nigerian sting tell of a feeling similar to that of rape, of unbearable humiliation. The mental damage is even more severe when it comes to people who were initially in debt or in other difficulties, and believed that the huge pile of money they were promised would get them out of their difficult situation.

Leslie Fontaine, a 48-year-old British technician, was the victim of such a scam in early 2004. He was over twenty-five thousand pounds in debt, about two hundred thousand dollars, when he received an e-mail message that he had won over a million pounds in the lottery. When it finally dawned on him that it was all one big lie, he broke down. He left a note for his wife in which he wrote that he could no longer cope with the situation, took a can full of gasoline and burned himself to death in an abandoned field.

There are many more tragic stories like this, but you'll be happy to know that there is a way to fight back against cheaters and pay them back, literally, in kind.

419eater.com is home to the people who have made it their goal to fight the Nigerian sting scammer. The number 419 refers to a law enacted in Nigeria which is designed to combat this fraud, which is costing this poor country what little reputation it still has. The members of the 419eater website call themselves 'scam fishermen'. They do not delete the Nigerian sting letters they receive in their mailbox - they return a reply, but pretend to be rich and famous themselves: one, for example, pretended to be Bjorn - one of the singers in the Swedish 'Abba' band, and another to a senior cardinal in the Vatican. They pay them back in the same currency, and convince the fraudsters to do crazy tasks for them in exchange for large sums of money: to pose for pictures with silly signs, to conduct delusional and invented religious ceremonies and even, in one case that has become a classic, to be photographed recreating Monty Python's classic skit, the 'Dead Parrot' skit '. worth watching.

מקור

This article is taken from the show's script.Making history!', a bi-weekly podcast about the history of science and technology.