Cyber Crime Fighters: Tales from the Trenches

11Phishing, Pharming, Spam, and Scams

You may not recognize terms like “phishing” or “spam,” but we guarantee that you’ve been a victim of them a thousand times over. Throughout this book, we’ve covered many different forms of cyber crime, some of which have serious implications to your own personal safety. But there’s an entirely different category of cyber crime that can impact you on many other levels—by consuming your time and Internet bandwidth with what is virtually “junk mail”; by scamming innocent victims out of a lifetime of savings; by duping you into visiting misleading websites so your passwords can be stolen. We’ve become so accustomed to these daily intrusions that we sometimes forget that they are still crimes!