How to Finally Rid Your MySpace Account of Phishers, Hackers, and Spammers

MySpace proudly displays its motto on the website's front index page: "A place for friends." It's also a place for hacker's, phisher's, and spammers to prey on novice Internet users. Many the innocent MySpacer has logged into his homepage, only to find that his outgoing messages are frozen by MySpace tech support due to several other users reporting spam sent from his account -- spam sent by a phisher or a hacker. Comments and bulletins appear countless times a day via the same methods, and still others can be traced back to bot manufactured accounts that are solely created for spamming. If the billions upon billions of MySpace users unite in a front to stop it, this abuse will diminish.

The first preventative measure on deck: preventing accounts from being phished. A phisher is someone who creates fraudulent log-in pages or account sign-up pages in order to steal your information. On MySpace, phishers are out to steal usernames and passwords in order to access user's accounts for the phisher's own purposes -- usually those purposes involve generating spam.

Yes. Tom and the gang have just announced that they have modified homepage URL paths in order to slow down these idiot phishers, but remember that phishers are computer geeks who have way too much time on their hands -- they'll eventually crack this new system. The two simplest things to do in order to stop phishers are changing your password -- often -- and never logging in to your account on any other page than the main index front page, http://www.myspace.com. Choose a complicated password -- one fashioned from a nonsense word and contains both letters and numbers.

If you happen to have an extra fifty bucks, go the high-tech route. This year's upgrades of most virus detectors also have a built-in fraudulent website detector. I like Norton 360. It automatically directs you to a warning page if your browser was redirected into a phisher's trap.

Next up on the quest for spam eradication: checking out your friends list. Unless you've met each of the people who actually created the profiles listed in your friends section in person, you are guaranteed to have at least one bot generated profile linked from your MySpace. First, click "edit friends" from your MySpace homepage. Next, go through your entire list of friends, page by page, and delete any profiles that are marked as having been already removed by MySpace (ie, "this profile has been deleted). These boxes denote spammer profiles that are embedded into your friends list -- hidden. You cannot access these pages in order to delete them from anywhere else on your homepage other than "edit friends," as these hidden profiles are only decoded in this view. Pretty sneaky, eh? Click delete, and make those intruders nothing more than a distant cyber memory in an old IE cache file. Many MySpacers who have 10K+ friends find this kind of spammer extermination tedious and grueling, but it's well worth it compared to deleting hundreds of spam comments each day.

Now that those embedded spammers are gone, take note of any additional profiles that leave unwanted advertisements in any of your comments sections, and delete those as they come. Not every bot created profile is embedded. Just like ridding your cat of fleas, the best way to rid your MySpace of any future infestation is adequate precaution and prevention. Prevent your MySpace from ever getting spam again by following these steps:

1. Set your account to approve all comments: This feature is available in your account settings. It controls your comments, picture comments, and blog comments. Anytime you receive a comment, it will not show up on your profile unless you allow it. Visitors to your profile will not see the spam advertisement, and it buys you just enough time to seek out the offending profile and delete it from your friends list.

2. Set your account to receive messages and comments exclusively from people on your friends list: This sets your profile to only allow communication from people who are on our friends list. Also found in your account settings, this feature may potentially upset people who want to be your friend in the future, but that just might be the chance you'll have to take.

3. Look before you leap: Sure, that guy or woman may look smokin' hot in their profile pic, but you're just asking for trouble if you approve that friend request without checking out your requester's profile. Here's some profiles that should send up some red flags and leave your mouse cursor pointed at "deny:" Spam within the profile: If you read the requester's "about me" section, and it says something like "Look at my hot, naked webcam videos! Click here!" Or maybe, it'll look like a real profile, with information filled into all the headings, even a layout was chosen, but somewhere in the middle of the "about me" section, it'll say something to the effect of, "I recently made a lot of money doing surveys." Below this statement, an advertisement for survey sites is posted. Do not get sucked into this scam. The only way anyone gets paid for doing online surveys is by signing up for the services the sponsors of the website offer. Anyone who has advertisements all over their profile are usually bad news. This profile contains adult content. Click here to download MS viewer:Microsoft does not have an application called "Viewer." Whoever set these profiles up used "MS" to make visitors think of Microsoft. Anything that has the Microsoft name attached to it will say "Microsoft" or "MSN," followed by a trademark symbol. Don't be fooled, and especially don't download! This MySpace profile contains spy ware. A virtually blank, white screen that contains nothing but a profile picture: Those silly spammers are at it again. Don't assume that a blank profile is set to private unless printed at the top right hand corner of the screen is "This Profile is Set to Private."

Though MySpace has caught and sued a few phishers and spammers, such as their lawsuit against phisher Scott Richter, they unfortunately cannot catch them all. It is up to us, the common user, to join forces and battle against this rising evil on the Internet. We have to keep each other informed of new ways passwords are stolen and spam is generated. Together, we can make the Internet enjoyable -- from MySpace and beyond.