Absolutely DO NOT open or respond to this email - it's a hack job. Most of us have by now received similar emails. If you can call or write this gentleman, do so, and inform him that his email has been hacked - he needs to close that account and open another one. Don't delete it... forward it without opening to fraud.at your email provider.com, i.e. [email protected], or [email protected].

Many times if you right click on the unopened email, it will pull up a box; select "View Message Source," and you can pretty well see where it comes from. Sometimes it will end with "ru" (Russia) or "ch" (China). That's where a lot of this type of scam comes from.

It always amazes (and dismays) me to see how many people there are in the world who don't seem to have anything better to do than to hack into and/or destroy other people's computers. :(

HIS email has been hacked and is being used to scam everyone in his Contact box. Someone mentioned the Viagra/Cialis scam, and it's pretty much the same thing, only it doesn't ask you to wire money. Once I know someone has been hacked like that, I just check it in my mailbox and send it to Junk. That way, the service provider is also notified. Then I write to the person and tell them what happened (but they probably already know, because someone else will also have notified them), so they can close that email account.

Then go into your Contacts list and add at the very top, as the first address, the address [email protected]. That will usually stop hackers from getting into your Contact list... they can't go past that nonsense address.

Last week I got a heart rending message from a long time friend. She had to go suddenly to another country to help a cousin and needed $1, 500 dollars to get the cousin back to the states for an operation to save her life!!! We met the next day at our Beta Sigma Phi meeting...she was astonished to learn she had left the country!

We both had AOL mail for personal letters.

Now that you mention it, every single one of these scam pleas I've gotten has been from an AOL address. My cousin, who is a pediatric nurse in MS, needed $2500 to pay her bill and eat - poor thing was half-starved <G> - so when she didn't answer her home phone, I called her at the hospital. Imagine how shocked she was to learn that she was in Scotland having such a hard time. I could hear the other nurses laughing in the background. I was the third person to call her!

i had this happen with my hotmail account and every contact on my contact list was sent an email saying i was in europe and needed money to come home. the hackers had changed my profile including passwords so i couldn't even close out the hotmail account. i ended up abandoning the account and opening a new one with gmail. shortly afterwards there was an item in the new york times about hacksters that were doing this to many hotmail account holders.

That's a very common e-mail scam. Someone has hacked his mail and is using his acct. Do you have another way to contact him? If not, delete it and ignore it. I had e-mailed the minister many times so it was evident to me when someone got into his e-mail acct and the conversation made a bad turn. Don't participate.