I hope not.
Between us we get about 400 a day. They range from " Important and rich person X died in plane crash/lung cancer/murder, out of all the villains in all the world you are the only person we can think of to release several megapoonds!" through update your Facebook/bank/ebay/paypal details, to I'm a beautiful Russian lady who given a choice of anyone in the world would like to shag Garage Joe, even if apparently he does need viagra and a penis enlargement

*** crosses Joe off mailing list ***

Yep, 'fraid so. It's not just the naive and computer-illiterate either. Many of the victims of things like 419 scams are supposedly "experienced" businessmen.


From the scammers' perspective, remember that they send out hundreds of thousands of these things. They only need a tiny handful to reply for it to be worthwhile.

Yes! It  surfaces in Grauniad Money from time to time. Very sad stories about old ladies being conned out of every last cent chasing mythical sums and increasing expenses, people surrendering control of accounts, and of course a  lot of 'em don't like to admit to their nearest and dearest.

I got one on Skype informing me that not only had my Uncle Daniel died in a plane crash, he also died in an Earthquake some months later, he was a very unlucky soul was Uncle Daniel

With the help of the great Suzi-Q, I sent back a brilliant message asking them to make a large deposit into an off shore bank account for me, and to give me his Credit Card details to book myself into a Hotel in Zurich, where we could meet to discuss how to split the millions!!!!!

I never got the Hotel Booking confirmation

Can you report these to anybody? Like hotmail or Visa? They are using Visa's logo and it looks very convincing...

I have been getting emails from HSBC and Halifax saying I need to update my on line banking details, I don't even have accounts with these banks (I'm with Nat West) so I just delete them, I'd love to know how they get your email address though as these come through my BT internet e mail addy, the only one I have.

There's one doing the rounds...allegedly from the Inland Revenue...with a very convincing form to fill in......saying that the recipient is due a tax refund.
This is a scam....the IR do not contact people online....in fact 99 times out of 100...you have to make the effort to get anything due to you out of their grasping mitts

 Nice one

On hotmail, you can mark mail as "Junk" or as a "Phishing scam" (which is what this looks like). For the latter, select the e-mail and go to the "Mark as" drop-down menu at the top of the hotmail page, then select "Phishing scam".


For Visa: They probably know about this already, but if you go to their official website and go through the "Security" and "Online Fraud" sections, you should find an address to forward any suspect e-mails to.

They have programmes which can harvest email addresses from sites such as this.

Well, in some cases it's not specifically YOUR address they haveb but a program to generate random addresses of a kmown format. i.e. [first name].[second name]@[something].com or .co.uk or .eu or .ie etc. some of the combinations will draw a blank, but many of them will match genuine addresses.

Scam???