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by Teresa Martin

Dear Friend,

I am Mr.Wong Tung Shun Peter Jp Non Executive Director of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd, Hong Kong.

Wow, I have a friend in Hong Kong. And he's emailing me!

An Iraqi named Haider Hanoon,a business man made a numbered fixed deposit of (346,736,899.68 TWD) ...and no one will ever come forward to claim it.

And, he's making me this amazing offer. Wow. It's just too good to be true! How timely that this email arrived the same day the 2008 Internet Crime Report!

The report, issued on Monday by the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a US agency that tallies reports of Internet crime, says that the news is apparently glad tidings for today's online snake oil salesmen and scam artistes, with a 33% rise in reported online fraud activity last year.

Losses from those crimes totaled $265 million, a $26 million increase from 2007. The average individual mark, errr, victim, lost $931. Isn't it nice to know some things are recession proof? Heh.

The top complaint was that promised goods never arrived. Auction fraud, credit card fraud and that perennial cross-media favorite confidence scams rounded out the top hits parade. Hey Mr Wong Tung Shun Peter, can I send you a copy of this PDF? It's pretty good reading! (http://www.ic3.gov/)

Well, since we're talking scams, just who is this Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) anyway? It appears to be a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), funded by a bunch of grant funds. Hmm, is this for real? What's the FBI organization anyway?

Don't worry, I'm just tweaking your sense the paranoid! It is real and it is an organization set up to track and monitor fraud activities occurring through online channels and it has been reporting on the statistics since 2000.

However, a healthy dose of the paranoid is a good thing to take when you hear of offers that are just too good to be true. Take our letter from Mr. Wong Tung Shun. It is a form of the old confidence game that has become so common online it falls into a separate category in this report, a category called "the Nigerian letter." Many of these types of letter purport to be from someone in Nigeria, hence the name. They all ask for help in releasing funds, they all include odd spellings and grammar, and they are all fraud.

Are you saying "well, duh!" right about now? Hold that thought. Some 5.2% of the $265M in reported 2008 losses are attributed to the Nigerian letter category. Uhm, that's $13.7M. With an average loss of $1650 per report. So, more than one or two recipients fell hard for a slight variation on an old time confidence game ... and $13.7M went into some grifter's pocket.

My proposal, I am prepared to place you as the next of kin in a position to instruct HANG SENG BANK to release the deposit to you as the closest surviving relation.

Other con games accounted for an additional 14% of the total reported losses. Confidence games are interactions in which a breach of a relationship of trust results in financial loss. Can you say Madoff, anyone? Con games like the Nigerian letter and variations on the Ponzi scheme stick around because - regardless of the delivery channel - there's one born every day ... as Mr. Barnum liked to say.

The most common complaint of 2008 was non-delivery of promised merchandise, followed by auction fraud, and credit card fraud. Many of these revolve around eBay or Craigslist. Another old phrase comes to mind - buyer, beware! The vast majority of transactions are completely legit, but when you reach a certain volume, the charlatans and crooks inevitably appear.

Interestingly, men lost more money than women - a ratio of $1.69: man and $1.00: woman. Half the complaints came from people between the ages of 30 and 50 and one-third came from Florida, California, New York, or Texas. Oddly (or maybe not so oddly considering the history of the con) Florida, California, and New York were also the states of the greatest number of perpetrators, aka, the baddies behind the scams.

So what's an innocent soul like you or I do about all this? How do we prevent becoming a victim? The answer is surprising straight forward and can be summarized thusly:

Use Common Sense!

The Internet Crime Complaint Center includes several pages of tips including:

• Be skeptical of individuals representing themselves as Nigerian or other foreign officials asking for your help in placing large sums of money in overseas bank accounts;
• Do not give out personal financial account information;
• Purchase merchandise from reputable merchants;
• Examine the feedback from the seller and use common sense.

And, the biggie, to quote IC3 directly:

Rule of Thumb: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I do not want any direct link between you and me. My official lines are not secure lines as they are periodically monitored to assess our level of customer care in line with our Total Quality Management Policy. Should you be interested I will prefer you to send me your FULL NAMES,ADDRESS,OCCUPATION AND PHONE NUMBER.on the email address below.
I await your response.

So my dearest Mr.Wong Tung Shun, I must fondly and with greatest respect amount, press now a button with name of DELETE.

And dearest readers, don't become part of the 2009 IC3 numbers. Don't stop online transactions - but don't forget all the lessons you've learned in the real world. Those notions of common sense, caution, and intelligence in business dealings apply every bit as much in virtual space as they do in the world of the flesh and flesh handshake.