The below are the next few tips following my previous post to protect yourself against frauds and scams. Hope that they will be useful to you. Do drop me a comment if you think that they are useful.

1. Report lost or stolen checks immediately. The bank can block payment on the check numbers that are missing. Also, review new checks you receive, to make sure none has been stolen in transit.
2. Store new and cancelled checks, credit card statements, medical bills, anything with confidential information, in a safe place and shred them when you are done with them.
3. Guard your Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) for your ATM and credit cards, and don’t write on or keep your PINs with your cards. You should also guard your ATM and credit card receipts. Thieves can use them to access your accounts.
4. Be creative in selecting Personal Identification Numbers for your ATM and credit cards, and passwords that enable you to access other accounts. Don’t use birth dates, part of your Social Security Number or driver’s license number, address, or children’s or spouse’s names. Remember: If someone has stolen your identity, he or she probably has some or all of this information.
5. Use a good anti-virus software, anti-adware software and a hardware firewall on your computer, and keep them up to date. You need all three. Almost all modern Routers (Dlink, LinkSys, NetGear, Buffalo, Airlink, etc.) have a hardware firewall built in. See the left side of this page for the current recommendation for ant-virus / anti-malware programs.
6. Don’t put outgoing mail in or on your mailbox. Drop it into a secure, official Postal Service collection box. Thieves may use your mail to steal your identity.
7. If regular bills fail to reach you, call the company to find out why. Someone may have filed a false change-of-address notice to divert your information to his or her address.
8. If your bills include suspicious charges, don’t ignore them. Instead, investigate immediately to head off any possible fraud before it occurs.
9. Check your credit report regularly.  Federal law allows you to obtain one from credit report from each of the 3 major credit reporting agencies per year.
10. There are services online, some free, such as SneakMail that provide you with disposable addresses that can be deleted if they begin to receive spam messages. The disposable email addresses forwards email to a real email address of yours, but the sender can not see this. If you create a unique address for each email newsletter or forum you subscribe to you can  discard the address is it gets too much spam and just start using another email address.
11. NEVER buy anything from a company that sends you spam. Don’t even visit their sites or ask for more information. It is like feeding a stray cat.  Give it one morsel of food, and it will be there all the time (and that may be fine with cats, but NO one wants spammers at the doorstep!).  Remember, since they send out millions of spam emails, they only need a tiny fraction of responses to be profitable. 
    And if that doesn’t convince you, consider this: the vast majority of spam “offers” are in fact scams!
12. Set up filters in your email program.  Outlook does this quite easily. When you open an email and realize that it is spam, just click on Actions then Create Rule, then select an appropriate action, such as “from” then click “Move e-mail to folder” and select the “Deleted Items” folder. That’s it!  You’ll never receive email from that particular address or subject again! 
13. If you have a website, do not post your address in the HTML “mail-to” format, otherwise you will be spammed, since address-harvesting spiders (programs) extract your email address from the website and add it to the spammer’s lists.  Instead use feedback forms through PHP, ASP, or JSP that hide the email address, OR post the email address as a GIF (image file).
14. Finally, if it seems to good to be true… IT IS! No one is going to send you a pile of money from a dead Nigerian president, no lottery is going to make you a winner from a “randomly selected from a database of email addresses”.  Multi-level marketing IS A SCAM, ALL psychics are nothing more than conmen, and you can not  make big money from “passive residual income in a few hours of your spare time each day”. And there is no Easter Bunny.

Cheers!
Patrick