mail from stranger

Incidentally, even if Mr Soo were real and the proposal he is offering were possible, it would be highly illegal. Think about it! If this guy works in a bank and can access people's accounts and is prepared to share money that is not rightfully his with you (why you, anyway?), that is stealing! Of course, these scams never do have access to any funds. All they will do if you foolishly reply is to ask you for some kind of fee 'to release the funds' or 'as security' or 'to pay the courier fees'. Once you get as far as paying that, it is probably the last you will hear of them. Sadly, there are a number of people who have been taken for a ride like this. One hears about a few of them on the News but I wonder how many more choose to hide their red faces and cut their losses. I am told that the response to spam (unsolicited mail) can be as high as 1%. That means that, for every 100 people who receive an offer like this, one person will respond. These people send out thousands of emails a day! If it was not worth their while, do you think they would keep on doing it? Why you? ... How did they get your email address? There are many ways of getting an email to you. One way is to have a program which generates millions of random names and then adds them to @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com or any other common free address. Computers are wonderfully fast at this! No doubt, when you send a mail, you select your addressee from your contacts list and send one at a time or maybe to a few friends. Spammers have software that can email thousands of names at a time! Another way they can get your email address is by buying CDs full of valid email addresses. I am not sure what they pay for these but $50 might be a ball-park figure. It's quite a big market, believe me. So, you ask, where do these addresses come from? Well, did you ever receive a mail from someone that was so funny or so heart-rending that you HAD to forward it to your friends? I bet you just hit the Forward button and put the addresses of all your friends in the To: box! Yeah, right! Take a look at one of those mails you received that was forwarded to you. Everyone does it without thinking, so you should find plenty of examples in your inbox. How many email addresses do you see in that mail? I have had mails which contained over a hundred mail addresses in them - all 'valid' because they were sent by real people to other real people. Imagine what happens when one of those mails ends up on the desk of an "email harvester"! He just has to do a little editing work on his day's emails and, bingo! he has another $50 CD (or download) to send out to his clients! You don't believe me? You can trust your friends and family 100%, of course ... well, OK ... how do you know you can trust [i]their [i/] friends and family as much? ... and their friends' friends ... and so on. In other words, there is a very good chance that, if you forward one of these emails in the way that people usually do, your email address (and those of your friends) will eventually end up with someone who sells them to spammers.