I know some time ago we discussed upon this topic on the list. Probably all of us (or at least many) have received an email (scam) from Nigeria or some other countries promising large sums of money if we cooperate with the sender. As I was curious to see how they deploy their fraud, I chose to follow up with one of the emails. I replied back and tried to gather more information regarding the mechanism of the fraud. I obviously stopped when I realized that they required more personal information (necessary for them to perform a "deposit") which actually would facilitate them to illegally withdraw money from my bank account... Well, up to here it was just a funny issue. But the problem came when I was constantly receiving "Nigerian, Zimbabwean and Ghanaian letters" from many diverse sources. Pure SCAM SPAM!!. I had to stop it somehow, and regular filters didn't seem to work. In this process, I found the Internet Fraud Compliant Center, "a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C)", and filed with them all the email addresses that I received all these weeks. It worked, now I don't even get one email related to that "profitable topic". Here is the IFCC web site: http://www1.ifccfbi.gov/index.asp. If you go under Statistics they have few reports on fraud over the Internet. I found it really interesting and amusing. They specifically addressed what they have denominated as "Nigerian Letter"... But there are many other fraudulent gems and data on the matter. Cheers everyone, HGZ Homero Gil de Zuniga Mass Communication Research Center University of Wisconsin-Madison http://www.geocities.com/homerogil