There are numerous fraudulent emails circulating on the internet. Most of us have received them repeatedly. The majority of these emails are referred to as phishing scams, and are designed to entice you to unwittingly provide personal information to the email authors. The information most often sought centers on user identifications, passwords and account numbers.

These emails are cleverly designed and they purport to be sent by such entities as eBay or PayPal, or sometimes they appear to have been sent by your bank or credit card company. Most of the time the messages are adorned by authentic-looking company logos, and many times sport other familiar-looking company graphics and phrases.

The enticement to respond to these emails is usually noted as a threat to close your account, or a threat to limit your account access, or an indication that someone has already attempted to compromise your account. Once a response is received, the information is used by the thieves themselves to compromise your account. This is accomplished by such means as withdrawing your funds, charging goods to your account, or using your good name and reputation to defraud others.

Other fraudulent emails attempt to get you to send money on the promise of receiving more money in return. These range from world lottery scams to wealthy foreign dignitaries who have died and left fortunes that need to be transferred to your bank account. There's no end to the stories that are contrived to help separate you from your hard-earned money.

But with all of the scams afoot, I'd never seen one that centers on coin collectors in particular until I received the following, offset email message the other day.

I found your email newsletter while doing a search on google for email coin newsletters. My name is (name deleted for WINS publication). I represent several individuals with coin collections valued at and above$99,900.

These individuals have hired me to seek out newsletter publishers such as yourself in order to negotiate a deal.

Here is our plan.

If you send out a mailing to your subscribers letting them know about the coin collections for sale, we are willing to give you 10% of the sell price that result from any deal.

To insure that you are paid promptly and the exact amount promised, we are even willing to let you collect the funds, keep your 10% and remit the other 90% to us. After we receive the funds from you, we will ship the entire collection to the person on your list that buys.

If this interest you please contact me asap at ... (email address deleted for WINS publication).

PS If you are interested, it is extremely important that you contact me in the next 24hrs as we are entertaining offers from several others.

I believe it's pretty obvious that the author of this message desires to use a middleman to sell a fictitious coin collection. In this case the enticement is to collect the funds in advance, retain 10%, and send the balance to the thief. The thief receives the funds, but the coins are never sent to the buyer. The unwitting middleman is left holding the bag and has potentially incurred liability for all of the stolen money.

I surmise that coin collectors are not the only hobbyists who have received this email. With a bit of alteration, it has likely been sent to collectors of stamps, trading cards, glassware, gem stones, and many others as well. You'll note that the above email copy has grammatical errors. That's a common theme among fraudulent emails.

Please be careful of any email you receive that requests personal information. Remember, most legitimate companies won't contact you in that fashion. And when an email promises easy money, please conclude that it's too good to be true. Most of us are too smart to fall for these scams. But it doesn't hurt to share this information every so often.

Best Regards,

Ralph J. Huntzinger
WINS President