FBI Special Agent hosts presentation on scams

SUN CITY – People exploiting others through nefarious means has been around for centuries. Today those people bombard your email inbox with mountains of spam. According to J. Goodman and W. Yin in their presentation entitled, “Online Discriminative Spam Filter Training,” in the proceedings of the Third Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS), in 2006, about 80% of all emails are spam. Within that spam are countless emails that are trying to scam you. The old adage of, “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is,” rings very true for most of these scams.

FBI Special Agent Herbert “Skip” Hogberg III will host a presentation in Sun City on July 8 about how to protect yourself from these scams.

“I’m coming up on finishing nine years [of being a Special Agent for the FBI],” said Hogberg. “[The best part of being an FBI Agent] is being able to help people and put the bad guys in jail.”

This sense of justice and duty runs in the Hogberg family.

“My father and I were [actually] in the same [police] department [together],” said Hogberg. “People would show up and say I need to talk to Officer Hogberg, and they would be like, Which one?”

Therefore, Special Agent Hogberg’s grandfather was Herbert, his father was Butch, and he was, and still is fondly referred to as, Skip.

“There isn’t really any scam targeting the senior citizens themselves. Most scam artists [especially online] are looking for the easy target, and they will take whatever they can get. It doesn’t really matter what the age [of the victim] is,” said Hogberg.

Some of the most prevalent or well known scams are the Nigerian Prince scams, the lottery scams proclaiming you’ve won the lottery in some foreign country such as Canada, the Philippines, or Africa, and more recently an email from a friend asking for money to pay for hospital bills incurred in a foreign country due to injury.

The best advice that people can take to heart is as follows. “Don’t give out passwords or personal information to people that you do not know,” said Hogberg. If you cannot verify the person’s identity, then it is best to simply relegate that email to the spam folder. The key is to be vigilant and use common sense. To learn more about protecting your identity or recognizing a scam, be sure to look for Special Agent Skip Hogberg’s presentation coming to Sun City on July 8.

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