Resources to Help You Protect Yourself and Your Family from Scammers in Particular and Cybercriminals in General

With the Holidays in full swing, what can you do to protect yourself and your family from cybercriminals? Educate yourself! After all, the scammers spend a great deal of their time learning ways and technology to effectively separate you from your money. Why shouldn't you learn how to protect yourself?

Here are some online resources that may be of help:

• If you have ever received emails asking for money for orphans or victims of hurricanes; informing you that you've won a foreign lottery, telling you that you've been contacted because you’re known to be of good integrity and could be trusted to bank $30 million in your savings account, for a generous fee of 10% of the sum, then you need to get Michael Berry’s anti-scammers book, "Greetings in Jesus Name! The Scambaiter Letters". Go to his Amazon site: www.Amazon.co.uk/GreetingsinJesusName

• Another scam-fighter has decided to fight back with what he calls “Scamorama”, those who are '419' scambaiters. (The '419' scam is a form of advance fee fraud.)

“Scambaiter”, as he calls them, are people who write back to '419' scammers just to yank their chains, waste their time, or as the British say, wind them up. Learn all about scams, scammers, and scambaiters at Yes, It Is a Scam. Go to: www.Scamorama.com/

• File a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, the nation's consumer protection agency. It collects complaints about companies, business practices, and identity theft under the FTC Act and other laws we enforce or administer. Your complaints can helps the FTC detect patterns of wrong-doing, and lead to investigations and prosecutions. 


The FTC enters all complaints it receives into Consumer Sentinel, a secure online database that is used by thousands of civil and criminal law enforcement authorities worldwide. It does not resolve individual consumer complaints. Go to:  www.FTCComplaintAssistant.gov/

• To protect yourself from medical, health care product and service scams or simply to learn what's taking place, get free consumer information from the US Federal Trade Commission. Go to:    www.FTC.gov/

• Educate yourself about current and ongoing Internet trends and schemes identified by the Internet Crime Complaint Center along with its description. Go to: www.IC3.gov/