A New Scam Hits The Web

~ New Twist On An Old Scam ~

Virtually anyone with an email account eventually receives na message running one of the oldest scams in the book.

Often referred to as the "Nigerian Letter," this scam ninvolves getting a message from someone in a foreign ncountry claiming to need a way to get 21.5 million dollars nout of the country (the first country used in this scam was
Nigeria, hence the scam's name).

He knows that you "are a trustworthy individual" and if nyou'll just send him your bank account information he will ndeposit the money in your account and give you 15% of the ndeposit.

Of course, after you give up your banking information the nscammer empties YOUR account.

Well a new scam has spawned to take advantage of one of the nweb's most successful and widespread activities - online nauctions.

The scammer sends you an email offering to purchase an item nyou're selling through an online auction or in the nclassified section of your local paper.

They tell you a relative living in the area will pick up nthe goods, however, when the check arrives, it's made out nfor more than the agreed price (often thousands more).

The bidder asks you to refund the difference and keep a npercentage for your "trouble."

Of course the check is forged and, if you refund the ndifference, you can kiss your money goodbye.

Moral of the story: free money is only free for the person nwho steals it from you! nnn~ The Coming Storm Over DVDs ~

If you thought Napster caused a stir over trading music and nthe illegal CD-ROMs people made on their computers, wait nuntil everybody gets a DVD burner!

The average price for an excellent DVD burner has dropped nwell below $400 and medium to low priced computers now ninclude DVD burners as standard equipment.

The only thing holding back the avalanche of DVD copying nseems to be the rather hefty cost of buying blank DVDs.

With an average price of $1.50-2.00 each, blank DVDs cost nfar more than blank CDs, which run around 20 cents each.

But, if you look back about 6 years, blank CDs used to cost na dollar apiece, so it won't take long for the price of nblank DVDs to drop.

When that price drop does come and every home with a ncomputer can also duplicate full-length movies on DVD, nwatch for one of the biggest upheavals in the history of
Hollywood.

It will make the music industry's crackdown on illegal nmusic sharing look as mild as a 5 minute "time out" in the nlocal pre-school class. nnn~ Yahoo! - Still King! ~

In a bid to capture even more of the world's search engine ntraffic, search giant Yahoo! recently purchased the web's nlargest pay-per-click search engine, Overture.com.

In the process (and more importantly), since the ncommissions from pay-per-click advertising with Overture nrepresent a major source of revenue for most of the other nmajor search engines, Yahoo! definitely holds the upper nhand.