Better Sex, More Money

That's when Lanford and some colleagues launched ScamBusters, a clearinghouse for the lowdown on lowlives. For more than six years, Lanford, one of the founders of WZ.com, a software development company, has debunked some of the Web's biggest whoppers in his spare time. Herbal Viagra. Urban legends. Shams. Cons. Pyramid schemes. ScamBusters has exposed them all. Today, the organization's newsletter has more than 120,000 subscribers.

ScamBusters went big when it unraveled an ingenious con disguised as a plaintive cry for help from a Nigerian government official. Turns out it was a scheme to extract money from gullible Web surfers. Since then, Lanford has turned his focus to identity theft and other shams. He's particularly interested in how the IT product and services channel handles hijinks. Because this issue falls on April Fools' Day, we wondered what scams were on Lanford's mind. Executive editor T.C. Doyle finds out.

VB: So, what's new?
Lanford: There's a ton of "pump and dumps" coming down today, which are attempts to pump up or pump down the price of a stock through the so-called leak of information by people actually looking to dump shares. Deadly stuff.

VB: Do scams ever go away?
Lanford: Every scam off the Web is on the Web and vice versa. And everyone we bust comes back in a different name. The Nigerian fee scam we broke quite a few years ago is coming around again today. It's just named after a different African country.

VB: Are people generally smarter than before?
Lanford: Yes, but there are always newbies. Some are confused, others greedy. In our other line of work, we produce books and software. Some of our legal notices, to the untrained eye, look similar to the spammers and scammers. You have to be careful.

VB: Resellers, consultants and IT service providers. Savvy guys for the most part. Do they fall for scams?
Lanford: Sure. The ones your readers need to be vigilant about are people passing bad credit cards to them. In these cases, the bank will almost always stick it to your audience. They also have to watch what they buy and sell on eBay.

VB: How about the responsibility of VARs to protect their customers?
Lanford: Yes. They need to help educate their customers that, "if it's a spam, it's a scam." In general, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

VB: As someone who has seen so many unscrupulous criminals, do you admire the creativity of some scam artists?
Lanford: Absolutely. If these people were to spend as much energy and creativity on a legitimate business, they would clean up. It actually takes more energy to sneak onto sites, misappropriate Yahoo accounts and move around different ISPs to steal servers to broadcast a message.

VB: What's one scam you think is clever?
Lanford: I don't know about clever, but I think the IRS e-mail audit scam is bold. When I saw that, I thought, "who in their right mind would believe they could harvest bank-account numbers and credit-card numbers simply by sending someone an e-mail claiming to be from the IRS and conducting an e-audit of their taxes?"