Here's how to combat e-mail spam scams

It looks like the FBI has been busy lately sending e-mails to people telling them they need their assistance in an investigation.

The FBI is on a hiring spree(fbijobs.gov), but spam is not a recruiting tool.

The e-mail, pretending to be from the FBI, promises to release the money that you were promised when you were, get this, "transacting with ... some impostors claiming to be The Federal Bureau of Investigation."

The FBI Anti-Terrorist and Monetary Crimes Division does not exist, the FBI says in a press release on this topic. Nor does the FBI have a unit in Nigeria - although because most of this garbage originates there, that might not be such a bad idea.

Many of the people who get these e-mails are upset by them. Here's part of an e-mail I recently received from Hector Pequeno, a fed-up reader:

"I am constantly almost daily dealing with e-mails like this. Where are they getting my address? Should I be concerned? Is there an organization I should forward these to so they would be aware? Should I just delete and ignore?"

Let me answer these questions:

Where do they get your address?

E-mail addresses are easily culled from all sorts of sources. People who enter drawings, make purchases online or sign online petitions can get their e-mail into a list sold to spam operations. Sometimes a person who legitimately has your e-mail is the victim of a computer hijacking. That lets all the people in their address book get bombarded with spam.

If your e-mail appears anywhere on the Internet, you are fair game. It's likely one of the reasons I get a few hundred spam e-mails every day.

Another way to get e-mails is through what the Federal Trade Commission has called a "dictionary attack." The spammer creates a list of letter and number strings in front of an "@" sign and common domain name. That generates millions of spam e-mails, some of which hit valid addresses.