I’ve seriously lost count, over the years, of how many things I’ve been warned about or encouraged to do by chain email.

Remember the Microsoft Money Giveaway email? The one that promised bucketloads of cash for forwarding the email to as many people as you could, because Microsoft had invented an email tracker and apparently wanted to reward people for filling the Internet with spam? Hands up anyone who knows anyone who received any money from it?

Or the one that said that aspartame, used in artificial sweeteners, was making people rot from the inside out?

Or the one that came with the soundfile that when you played it, could tell you your name, star sign and was able to answer basic questions about geometry? [1]

Amidst receiving all of those emails, did you ever wish you could send one back that described what it would be like if you followed all of that urgent advice?

If you answered, ‘Hell, yes!’, then you’re not alone…

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Footnotes:

1.	It’s very possible that I made that one up.
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I first wrote about the Nigerian Scam [1] back in July of 2001 on the ULRC site. It wasn’t by any means a new scam then, but the Internet was still rapidly expanding, and vast numbers of people were still making their way online for the first time, and were being exposed – at an alarming rate – to a scam the majority of them had never heard of before.

Almost six years later, and it appears that the Nigerian Scam is still going strong.

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Footnotes:

1.	Also known as an Advanced Fees Fraud and the 419 Scam, after the relevant section in the Nigerian criminal code that covers fraud operations such as these.
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