As the crisis in Japan continues to unfold, seemingly without end, more and more people are moved to donate to relief efforts to provide help and aid to the Japanese people, but aren’t sure which relief efforts are legitimate, or how to avoid the scams. Here are three legitimate, worthy organizations, all of which are involved in relief efforts to help the victims of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant reactor crisis. Each has a different focus, and all are legitimate, and will use your donations well.

There are reports of a huge increase in the amount of Japanese spam following the massive 9.0 earthquake, the aftershocks, and the tsunamis that battered Japan over the past weekend. There are several theories as to why the marked increase in spam from Japanese addresses and servers, ranging from “all hell breaking out” to “spammers, like cockroaches, can survive anything.”

With the concern over meltdown and containment (or lack thereof) of the nuclear reactors at the power plants in Japan, following the horrific 9.0 earthquake that Japan suffered this week, a lot of people are searching for information about Potassium Iodide (not “Potassium Iodine”), also known as KI (K for potassium’s elemental symbol, and I for iodide), which is the prescribed prophylactic measure to protect your thyroid from radiation poisoning from radioactive fallout from a nuclear disaster – military or otherwise. Here is the information you need about why to take pottasium iodide, dosage, and where to get it.

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.”