Scammers are surprisingly creative at devising ways of defrauding you of your money. A recent email scam targets job seekers who post resumes online.

Here’s how it works: the job seeker is offered a position as a “mystery shopper.” They are told to go to a store, purchase a few small items, and fill out a questionnaire to evaluate their experience with the store staff.

The scammer sends a check in advance for much more than the amount of the purchased items. The shopper is instructed to deposit the check into their account, then deduct the cost of the purchased items and the mystery shopping fee and wire the remainder back to the scammer.

The scammers may even suggest that you wait until the check clears before wiring them the money. Kathy Kristof of CBS MoneyWatch writes:

U.S. banking laws demand that the bank give you access to your funds within 5 days. That gives most consumers the mistaken impression that the check has cleared. It hasn’t. If it’s a forgery, it can take weeks – even months – to determine that it’s a fake.

In the same article Kristof writes:

A recent survey by Consumer Federation of America found that one in every three Americans has been approached by someone peddling a fake check. About 2% of those people bite and end up losing between $3,000 and $4,000 on the con.

The good news for Zenbe users is that most of these scam emails are caught by our spam filters and you probably never see them. But if you get one of these emails it’s helpful to understand how these scams work. Go take the fraud test at fakechecks.org to how susceptible you are.

Also beware of any work-at-home offer that purports to send you a “welcome kit” or solicits an initiation fee, particularly if they ask you to wire the money.

To learn more about email scams in-depth, take a look at the Advance-fee fraud topic on Wikipedia.

We created Shareflow with the banal goal of getting our  important online communication out of chat, out of our overloaded inboxes, and putting it somewhere where we could actually use it, focusing where  we need to. Via a website or  mobile device.   Accessing it once a day, once a week, or once a second – that shouldn’t matter.  Want to lurk on a conversation? Want to dive in and add some value? Do either, without overloading your, or anyone else’s inbox.

Shareflow is based on a simple idea: take a conversation with a specific audience, and treat it like a living, breathing thing.  Conversations are alive.  They are born. They persist. They die. Conversations can be about anything. They happen at different speeds, and they can happen anywhere.

We thought Google Wave had the same idea. Boy, were we wrong.

Google Wave is fun to play with. Its nifty. The protocols are cool. Developers love to play with it. So do I.

Is Google Wave going to help your team work better together? No way!

Do you really want to replay a wave to figure out who said what when?

Should everyone in my conversation be able to edit everything all the time?

There are already numerous public Waves talking about how not to use Wave.

Online messaging, the important parts, are often focused on information creation. This has natural steps or cycles, neither of which is supported  by Wave.

Lets talk about information creation. It’s not important whether its the new artwork for the annual report, the sales forecast, or a new software library.

We start when someone takes a stab at creating a version.  Then its discussed, then one or many take another stab. Repeat as necessary. When the audience agrees no more tries are needed, we are done. Perhaps the information is passed to a different audience, and things start all over again.  There is a shared understanding of what constitutes a “try” or what “done” means.

Google Wave rips apart what a “try” is, or what “done” could mean.  Its refreshing. Its creative. Its just not helpful.

I have worked in meetings where 5 or 20 people try to draft a document together. Its always horrible, and never successful. The coffee runs out. Just as well, its bad coffee. The meetings end with a few people being selected to create the next draft. Lawyers are driven to work this way. Its an ingenious way to increase billable hours.

Wave reminds me of those meetings.  Even worse, Wave treats a conversation like a bunch of people talking at the same time. If you want to understand what was said, you have to listen to the recording. This is not how people want to work together.

People want more structure than that. They need a beginning, the middle part, and sometimes, an end.

I wax poetic.  If you want a more concrete description of why Wave doesn’t add much yet, just read this.

We all agree email is awful.  Google Wave may get there.   Happy Google is innovating on the problem.  They just need to stop being cool for cool’s sake, and think about how the rest of us think.