If you see this text on your website or blog: “Today, I went to the beach with my children. I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She placed the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back! LoL I know this is entirely off topic but I had to tell someone!” ..your site has just been co-opted by a comment spammer.

In the world of email marketing oopsies, Shutterfly.com just delivered a whopping, bouncing baby screw-up. Shutterfly has sent out a massive number of “congratulations on your new baby” emails – to people who have not had babies. “Congratulations on your bundle of joy” says the email, “There’s nothing more amazing than bringing a new life into the world.” Although this faux pas on Shutterfly’s part is right up there.

Here is the full text of one of the newest Wells Fargo Phishing Spam, which started showing up this month (May, 2014). This one comes with an attached HTML file named “Wells Fargo Instruction Form.html”. Whatever you do, don’t download or open it!

Now, this is a new one: phishing spam that supposedly is a death notice of a friend; our example supposedly comes from Jason Bennett at Douglass Funeral Home.

Users were asked whether an email advertisement sent to them on the basis of a “pre-existing business relationship” was spam. All of the respondents were average Internet users, exactly the sort of user who receives this sort of email from countless businesses based on a prior business relationship with them. And survey says…. a resounding “Yes!” Two-thirds said that email advertisements sent on the basis of a pre-existing business relationship, without express permission, are spam!

What should be here is the article about what to do when you get spam from a Gmail account. In it we ranted about how Royal Stage Christian Performing Arts from Sacramento, and their executive diretor, Tamara Warta, spammed us, using Gmail and Google Apps. And we decried how difficult it was to report spam from a Gmail account to Google.

We’ve all received them. Those spam SMS messages that tell you that “Your entry in our drawing WON you a FREE $1,000 Target Giftcard! Enter ‘312’ at www.target.com.tgrz.biz to claim it and we can ship it to you immediately!”, or something similar about a Walmart or Best Buy gift card. Now the scum behind that text message spam, Daniel Pessin and Jacob Engel, along with their shell company Rentbro, have been taken down by the Federal Communciations Commission (‘FCC’).

The newest social engineering scam email hitting some inboxes is the “thank you for your Red Sox ticket order” email. In this spam, the fake order confirmation tells you that you have ordered over $200 ($238 in the example below) worth of Red Sox tickets, which have been charged to your MasterCard.

As was to be expected, there has been a massive swell of scam emails riding on the coattails of the back-to-back tragedies of the Boston Marathon bombing, and the Texas fertilizer plant explosion. “CAUGHT ON CAMERA: Fertilizer Plant Explosion” reads one bogus subject line; “Aftermath to explosion at Boston Marathon” reads another.

Ah yes, email scammers certainly love Facebook, because they know that Facebook users have become like trained monkeys, always clicking on any link to see who has said what about them. This latest scam, which takes you to a site in Russia, draws you in by saying that someone commented on your photo (in our example, it says “Blake Jones commented on your photo”).

There has been a rash of fake notices this week, supposedly from Apple, warning that “Your Apple ID was used to sign in to FaceTime, iCloud, and iMessage on an iPhone 5”. Hopefully, if you received one of these, you were quickly able to realize that these fake Apple alerts were spam, but just in case you weren’t sure, we are confirming that for you.

Twitter is trending with the promoted hashtag #AmexSync. Do you get annoyed with the “deals” that your Facebook friends “like” showing up in your newsfeed? Well prepare for it to get even worse on Twitter, as American Express and Twitter introduce Amex Sync, the service that connects your American Express credit card directly to your Twitter account. And rest assured, as Twitter has proven time and time again, your private information is secure behind their hack-proof system. (Not!)

Facebook proves once again that they can make the most underhanded actions seem like they are doing a favor for their users by testing a new feature: pay $1 to send a message to users with whom you’re not connected on the socia media site, in the name of reducing spam.

Yesterday we featured an article on the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) contest challenging anyone from the public to come up with a way to beat spam phone calls. The reason for expanding their efforts, says the FTC, is because complaints about spam phone calls, or, “robocalls,” more than doubled in April of 2012, from their last high in October 2010 . So what should we do to avoid these nuisance calls until our unknown hero steps forward with the answer?

Bots generate at least 10% of all online traffic, according to data released today by Solve Media, a company that provides security authentication solutions through CAPTCHA-based advertising technology. Solve Media indicates that they have seen a 400% increase in what they term ‘aberrant’ traffic across web-based services such as commenting, voting, registration, contact and commenting.