Yahoo Files Lawsuit to Protect Us

Yahoo has announced that they have filed a lawsuit against spammers and scammers who send out lottery scams using the name "Yahoo" in them. I am sure you've seen these - at least for me, most of them seem to be Microsoft lotteries, not Yahoo. These type of tactics are generally called "phishing scams".

Yahoo explains, "The complaint alleges that without permission or authorization, and with full knowledge and notice of Yahoo!'s trademark rights, the spammers willfully masqueraded as Yahoo!, and sent e-mails claiming that the recipient had won a lottery, prize or other award from Yahoo!."

Lately these scam emails have started to get smarter - it used to be easy to pick out things like poor english, grammar, company name spelling, etc. I have seen many phishing scams lately that look dead on accurate. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been hit with the "tax rebate verification" scams which look almost perfect. I am sure the average Internet user will fall for these scams. 

Yahoo reports that they block over 1 billion spam messages a day from their 260 million Yahoo email accounts.