Over the last 3-4 months it has really ramped up. They all look different, type/narrative is always different, but the gist is always the same. Trying to loan me money for business capital . Different senders. I block them and report as spam to my email server but the just keep coming from different senders.

Surely scams with spoofed names and return email addresses, but I get 7 or 8 a day. Are you folks seeing a lot of these too?

Not online, but there is about one a week by snail mail. Usually from the same companies. Is there something unusual about your credit rating? (Good or bad)

Most likely you ended up on some sort of list and the list seller has been successful lately.

I use a private email server: [email protected] and I have a custom built spam filter. Relatively few spam messages get through that filter, but it has a few years experience under its belt. I use a pattern search scan of the message headers. If you have “oz”, “Oprah”, “v..g.a”, or similar in the header, you’ll be trapped and I send a clear, terse rejection message code back to your SMTP server. Many spammers with reasonable quality control will notice these rejections and eventually remove my name. One would not immediately expect spammers to have quality control, but in my experience many do. If it’s not the spammer directly noticing my return code, the victimized sever admins will notice and close the loophole.

Its just the standard signs of a bubble getting ready to pop.

It does feel that way.

In the meantime, you can try freezing your credit score. It's rather a pain because sometimes you have to unfreeze it if you want to apply for a mortgage, credit card or other loan. Sometime even to get a car insurance quote. Because, as everyone knows, if you're behind in a payment you are also a really, really bad driver!

I've had a hard few months and I was beginning to wonder if it was just me.

Tell you one thing -- I'd LOVE to take the forty or so largish pieces of mail I get from Chase Bank every month down someone's.... uh, wait, now thinking of future quotations in social media...

I just keep getting emails for erectile dysfunction meds and walk-in tub’s. They think I’m 20 years older than I really am

I get the calls and emails all the time. I used to be the type of person who always answered my phone at anytime. Now I barely pick it up, I let it go to voicemail.

Hmmm. Robocalls are changing our telephone behavior for the worse.

Robocalls are actually having a negative influence on our society.

I feel like the robo/telemarketing calls are less than a year ago. I still get them, nearly always spoofing area code and usually my prefix. If I don't recognize the phone number it goes to VM. But the quantity seems down from the past.

My credit score is probably mid 800. It was 850ish 2 years ago and nothing has changed much to increase or decrease it. I doubt that is what is driving all the loan-biz capital emails.

Somehow I must have landed on some stupid list. I just keep blocking them and reporting them as spam. The company that serves my email has imbedded spam filters. Perhaps I'll look more into putting more teeth into it.

In an earlier life, when I had more free time, I would try to identify the ISP where the email originated and notify them of the spam. This is not so effective now because most of the headers are fake and the sender is probably a poor granny computer in a botnet. The latest trick of the extortionists is to fake the headers to indicate that I sent the email to myself, then claim that they have infected my computer.

At one point I annoyed a spammer to the point where I was listed as the originator or Reply-To for his spam. That week I received about 8000 angry emails from my "victims".

For my level of spam, the custom filter is effective enough. Friends who are using gmail don't complain about spam. While it seems tacky (to me) for a business to use gmail, this would be fine for personal accounts. Gmail has an advantage over my home built filter because they can detect a barrage of identical spams in real time, wholesale block them, and add them to a forensic database to be used for identifying and ultimately busting the botnet.

You can get a Google gmail business account which uses your business name as the host name instead of saying [email protected]

Friday I got one from my wife’s phone number

I hope that a few weeks before I kick off I get to borrow a few million.

I will go out in style.....LOL

They are really ramped up on my main cell phone. I use my google number now when I fill out forms whatever. If I find that voice actor, I swear I will strangle them.

Maybe the new FCC ruling and some pending bills in Congress will help. Unfortunately, the carriers might use this as an opportunity to offer a premium "reduced spam" service.