new low

i get scam emails all the time and a friend of mine was even taken in by one, a long time ago. wound up costing around $5000 and the threat of prosecution for fraud.

the email I received today hits an all new low, but it works the same way...

Dear Brother in Christ,

I am Rev Greg Mark.Unfortunately, we are unable to help you. Our church states that we can
only do business with other members. If you were a member that would be one thing but since
you are not, there is nothing that I or anyone can do here. Sorry about that.

If you wanted to become a member, there may be a great many opportunities to do something
together, including helping you with your affairs.

Recently, our church was all set to begin an expansion into West Africa, Nigeria to be
exact. A member of only one month had promised to help us start a new congregation in Lagos.
He had completed all of the necessary steps to begin and was about to receive an initial
$5,000.000.00 to get started. Then, without warning, we never heard from him again. This was a great disappointment for us. If you wanted to take his place, we would be very eager to talk to you about that.

Let me know if this would be something that you would be interested in send me an email or call me through my cell phone - 17183548913.

Best regards,

Rev Greg Mark.

for anyone who has never seen this sort of thing, the methods used by this particular scam are very tempting. they offer to send you money and they really do in the form of a check. then they ask you to send them money for some contrived reason...to forward to a clerk or pay for services rendered or whatever, but it's usually only a portion of what they send you. so you wind up with money in your pocket and they get some cash from you...the catch is...it's a bad check and you're stuck holding the bag for cashing a fraudulent check and the sender (usually out of country and untraceable) has your cash. this friend of mine cashed at least 3 checks via this method before the bank put a stop to it.

some of these letters are more obvious than others, but they all amount to the same sort of thievery and should be filtered, ignored and/or sent to the authorities whenever possible.

if you, or someone you know has ever been taken in by something of this nature, you can contact the FBI internet fraud division to make a claim. this is a good step to take to be sure the victim is not made the criminal.