Hello all, the following explains how to avoid scam artists and spam, which sadly can affect us here.
Dear Members,
In this edition of our semi-periodic newsletter, I want to remind our people of good practices to avoid problems with scammers and spammers. Both have targeted our community in the past and they continue to. We catch a lot of the spam bots and eliminate them before they establish accounts. But some of them leak through.
One of our members came to our site ownership just yesterday with a story of being invited to correspond by direct personal email with another member who had "something of vital importance" to communicate. The member thought it might be yet another spammer advertising a fraudulent "cure" for TN. In this case, the "something of vital importance" that the scammer wanted to communicate was an invitation to participate in a money transfer growing out of a supposed "inheritance" in West Africa. This is a scam seemingly as old as the hills, mounted by low-life fraud artists in Nigeria. I am amazed that anybody falls for it any more, but a few people seem to each year, sometimes losing thousands of dollars that they are asked to wire off-shore, as a guarantee of their performance as agents for the "estate."
The villains in this scam regularly prey upon people who are distracted by age, loneliness, or debilitating illness -- as a good many of our members are. If it were up to me, anyone found practicing such evil would be staked out on a fire ant nest with honey smeared liberally on strategic parts of their anatomy. But failing that, we can at least back-trace their email addresses and alert international law enforcement authorities. And we will.
The moderators and owners strongly discourage member responses to contact invitations from people you don't know, or which do not define the subject they want to talk about. For your own privacy and security, it's usually a mistake to forward your personal email in response to a "blind" inquiry by someone you don't know from weeks of on-site interaction. Instead we ask that you forward such inquiries to a site moderator. If you are one of our community who gets value from friends and information here, then don't make it easy for fraud artists to victimize you.
Despite having weeded out the most recent threat, it's entirely possible that there are scammers still operating among us. If you are such a person be advised: we won't rest until you are behind bars or worse.
Go in Peace and Power,
Red Lawhern, Ph.D.
Moderator and Resident Research Analyst, LWTN
Visit Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN) - Online Support Group at: http://www.livingwithtn.org/?xg_source=msg_mes_network