Dear AOIR folks, I need advice. Someone e-mailed me claiming to have just found that he too is named Barry Wellman and is Jewish, having been adopted into a Raleigh NC Christian family at a young age. He's anxious to make contact with us Wellman's (of whom I am the last of my particular lineage). He gave me a strange sounding AOL return address. I checked on his name and there is someone at that address at Raleigh. In what Mapquest suggests is a residential neighborhood (lots of suburban crescents). A web search reveals nobody by that name in Raleigh. Is this a well-known scam or spam-finder. I do have a phone number to call -- thru a Yahoo finder service -- but if someone is playing a hoax on the person whose phone number it is, I don't want to deluge him. (What is the call-display blocking command, btw?) Meanwhile, I get at least one offer a day to help someone high up in Nigeria, Liberia, Congo, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe to do a scam and at the same time make me rich. Today, it was Laurent Kabila's second wife. I am thinking of throwing a cyber-party and inviting all these generous people;-) And so it goes. Barry ___________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman@chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 ___________________________________________________________________