Law Enforcement Modules from FBI

FBI is now probably the first Law Enforcement agency in the world to directly seek help from bloggers and website owners to track Predators, Missing Persons and Most Wanted Persons. This link to the FBI website shows the 4 different modules you can incorporate into your webpage to help nab a criminal.

Although the modules use [iframe] and cannot be called 'Widgets' as-such, it's still nice to see a government agency trying to use current technology to help a good cause.

If you have space available on your webpage and you haven't decided on what to do with it, give the FBI widgets a go. Who knows, you might even be able to win the reward set on one of the most-wanted people!

Via Mashable

New Frontier on Nigerian Scams - Hotels and Real Estate

I have posted here earlier on internet scams and the different ways they employ to dupe Average Joe of his money. It's a pity that most scams originate in Nigeria and I almost burnt my fingers once on eBay trying to make my first sale. What seemed legit business would have resulted in me shipping the item to an address in Nigeria without ever getting to see my payment. I was so happy on making a successful sale that I 'almost' overlooked the fact that the confirmation email did not originate from PayPal at all! Lucky save for me. If you are interested in finding out about the other methods used to cheat people, this post might be a good starting point.

Not to be left behind in the Web 2.0 phenomenon, the scammers have upped their techniques of duping people. The latest one, reported here, is an unsolicited email from someone (apparently) in the UK interested in making a real estate investment in your country. The very fact that the email is unsolicited should raise an alarm. If it doesn't, for some reason, consider the following:

No prior acquaintance

Person willing to invest in huge property (like a 5-Star hotel)

Unnecessary stress on 'Honesty'

Critical illness angle - shouldn't the person be looking forward to passing his family wealth to the next-of-kin at this point?

And here's what readers like you can do to help Average Joe - Spread the word. The strongest line of defense against 'new and improved' scam techniques is to get people informed as soon as a new technique is discovered. SunSeven also lists 16 ways in which scammers get access to your email ids.

Secure Your Email Address Online

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If you have a blog, you would probably want to give out your email address so that your readers can contact you. But how do you prevent scamsters trawling through webpages from harvesting your address and sending you lots of unsolicited email? More importantly, your email address might even appear in a Google search for your name! One way is to include your email like Fictitious_John [at] gmail [dot] com but this does not look very professional.

Here's an alternative that Fictitious John might be able to use: . Notice that the email address comes as an image and cannot be harvested by a crawler (Google included).

Hidetext lets you convert your text to images that can be embedded in webpages without any fear of them being harvested. What's more, you can download the image so that even Hidetext does not need to keep a copy on their servers. The current text limit is at a generous 100,000 characters - enough to convert all of your private information (up to and including entire blog posts, if you so desire). You can even choose the color, size and font of your text in the image. Here's Fictitious John's email address with a little more jazz:

This method of protecting personal information is as good as Captcha graphics you usually see on websites. Hopefully we'll see more users for Hidetext in the future.