Spams, Scams, and Hoaxes
December 5, 2002 • By Ed Wrather
12.05.02
For the LORD gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding; He stores up sound wisdom for the upright; He is a shield to those who walk uprightly; He guards the paths of justice, and preserves the way of His saints. Then you will understand righteousness and justice, equity and every good path. When wisdom enters your heart, and knowledge is pleasant to your soul, discretion will preserve you; understanding will keep you, to deliver you from the way of evil, from the man who speaks perverse things, from those who leave the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness; who rejoice in doing evil, and delight in the perversity of the wicked; whose ways are crooked, and who are devious in their paths. - Proverbs 2:6-15.
It appears that email spamming along with the scams associated with them is increasing. Just today a list of the top ten email spams and scams was released for the past month. The list was compiled by Sophos an anti-virus firm. The number one spam and malicious scam was the email claiming that the file jdbgmr.exe was a virus and giving instructions to delete the file. The claim is that by removal of the file it will keep your computer from getting a virus but this is a hoax. Instead of removing a problem it will create a problem if the file is removed.
Then there is the Bill Gates (number 9 on the list) spam, which claims that Bill will give you $245 every time you forward the email to another person. Not true! And there is still the giving away a fortune emails, which seem to be multiplying daily. Most of these originate in Nigeria and claim to be willing to give you a large sum of money. But there is always a catch and many have ended up losing much of their money trying to get the promised amount.
How can we protect ourselves from these often malicious emails? We need wisdom! True wisdom comes from our Father, who is willing to bless us abundantly with great wisdom. From the writer of Proverbs we see that wisdom comes from the "mouth of the Lord.” His Holy Word provides us with wisdom. The more of the Word of God we have in our life the greater will be our wisdom. As we act upon the Word of God in obedience we will find that we are "walk(ing) uprightly.”
As we saturate our lives with the Word of God and live according to that Word we find we will reap countless benefits as a result. Some of those benefits are wisdom, knowledge, understanding and discretion. Then we will be delivered from the "way of evil” and from those who delight in "doing evil.”
2010 Update: Not much has changed since 2002 except that there are more computer viruses than ever before. In addition, there is malware, adware, trojans, and other junk that can affect your computer. You still want to be careful about the links that you click on and the files that you open. There is now what is called a rouge antivirus. You think you are buying an actual antivirus but instead the rouge antivirus takes your money and all of your personal information.
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