Spam doesn't mean that anyone has a lead into your email account. Knowing someone's address doesn't mean you can get into their house... But it's annoying, so the warning not to post your email address is perfectly valid.

Alternatively, get yourself a free email address from Hotmail, Yahoo, Bigfoot or whoever, and use it solely as a destination for subscriptions to websites. You *know* it's going to get spam, but it'll be going somewhere that you don't care about.

Card-wise though, sadly it's all too possible. But then that's nothing different from how things used to be before the Internet - card fraud still happened back then. And most of it still uses the same method too, which is someone on the inside getting paid off.

Graham.