This is a short piece that is meant to be mainly informative perhaps with a slight rant to it.
I'm sure some of you have received e-mail that was unsolicited and annoying making promises that often seem to good to be true? Usually it's a get rich quick scheme, or some miracle cure for baldness. Sometimes they are more sinister, often, they are pleas of help from some parts of the world in dealing large sums of money.They extol that if you contact the sender they will be able to claim the money and help their country and give you a large cut of the proceeds. Once I received an e-mail that claimed a person sharing my surname but not related to me had died in a car crash in in the country side of Africa. If I was to contact them they could help retrieve the large sum of money held in banks in that country and I would get a cut of the money. Others refer to Shell Employees, or Government officials who have been killed/ousted and if you help them regain power or return to their country you will again receive a cut of the money held in that country's coffers.
These are all hoaxes, if something sounds too good to be true it is!
Simply delete the e-mail and ignore it. There is nothing more you can do. A website has been set up to fight this spam. I personally am not sure about it's validity [ I'm still looking into it] it claims however to be collecting details of these scams and forwarding them to the appropriate people, somewhere in Nigeria.
A lot of these scams claim to come from this part of Africa but not all do, the thing they have in common is that they need your help to access large sums of money, and if you help them they will give you some of the money the recover. This site, W.O.N.S.T ,is a site that purports to collect and collate data on the activities of these people, and Snopes 2 dot com has plenty of info as well.
Something else that annoys me no end is the endless mindless forwarding of seemingly do gooder e-mails that say if you forward and or sign this e-mail you will help save a life, change a countries policies etc, etc. Check this site first
http://www.snopes2.com, this is a good site for all kinds of information about many urban legends and myths. They have sections that specifically deal with e-mail scams and legends as well as all kinds of other stories that have circulated for many years. The surprising thing is that these stories often have a moral twist and that they are often very old with simple contemporary twists to them.