This is very interesting – an advance fee fraud scam aimed specifically at lawyers. In this twist on the classic Nigerian 419 advanced free scam, instead of the scammer being the “widow of a deposed dictator”, the supposed damsel in distress is a woman whose “divorce was finalized here in Japan”, and she “wants to retain your professional service.”

A new email scam floating around the Internet includes a picture of what appears to be a genuine passport in the name of the sender. The sample we have appears to be a real Algerian passport in the name of Morsli Boubakeur, which is who our email – coming from mauvai98@yahoo.fr – is allegedly from. But it’s still a scam – don’t be taken in.

Well now, here is a new twist on the age-old scam. No deposed, dead Nigerian potentate here. Instead, a broken-Englished girl named Kim, whose father Henry died tragically and left his estate to his daughter but she can only get it when she marries. So perhaps you, dear target, are the lucky man. Email addresses implicated in this scam, so far, include liiluv2000@yahoo.com and kimluv_account@mail2world.com.

The News Agency of Nigeria is reporting that Nigerian school children who are among some of the first recipients of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptops have used them to further their education, as intended – but perhaps not in a way that was intended. They are using them to surf explicit adult websites.

“Greetings from Iraq,” the subject line says. Who wouldn’t at least give that a glance the first time they see that in their inbox? And that’s exactly what scammer “Merrill Melvin Hansley”, a supposed security manager of STE,CCPLUS STORAGE SARL storage company in Iraq, is counting on.

The Spanish lottery scam, also known as the “Spanish Sweepstate Lottery”, “Spanish International Lottery”, and even “Spanish International Program” has hit the net. Whether it’s from Blanco Lopez, or someone else, it’s still a scam.

Your online resume may be ripe for a new scam by identity thieves in which they simply lift all of your personal information from your resume and assume your identity.

Every once in a while you have to just laugh at the 419 scammers who abound on the Internet.

Did you hear? IBM is spamming spammers! It’s all over the Internet, and tongues are a’wagging! Except, it ain’t so. IBM is not spamming spammers. Whether you think that spamming spammers is right or wrong, IBM ain’t doing it, and shame on CNN for getting it so wrong, and making…

The ECD, the full name of which is “The Electronic Civil Disobedience against the Fur and Vivisection Industry”, has declared open war on the Internet servers of companies which trade in fur. It is doing this by bombarding the servers of the targetted companies with email in an effort to…

Yesterday Aunty wrote to tell you about the Mugu Marauder, a new “art project” by an organization calling themselves “Artists Against 419”. The project has participants link to images from 419 scammer’s websites and display them on the participant’s own website, causing the displayed images to eat into the scammer’s…

I am so sick of spam. Aren’t you? Well, imagine how Bill Gates feels. It was recently revealed that he gets nearly 4 million pieces of spam a day. Yes, that’s right. 4 million. Now, that’s a lot by any measure. According to Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, “Bill literally receives…

On a sidenote to the much ballyhooed crackdown by the Justice Department on dozens of spammers, at least part of the funding for the crackdown came through the Direct Marketing Association’s “Operation Slam Spam”. The law under which these stings were made, CAN-SPAM, has been depicted as a win for…

I’ve been testing Google’s Gmail for 5 days now, since April 18th. Woohoo. In addition to openly soliciting email to the account, and even posting the address on the web, I’ve forwarded all of my email coming to my other accounts to the Gmail account. I wanted to give Gmail…

Today I received email with the subject line: “urgent query” The opening lines were: “Dear Madam, I am writing to you out of great desparation.” So, here’s the test: Do you think that this email was spam, or not? Perhaps I should have asked this instead: Is there a one…