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419 scams defined by Wikipedia August 16, 2009

The wikipedia describes 419 scams as this:

An advance-fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance sums of money in the hope of realizing a significantly larger gain.[1] Among the variations on this type of scam, are the Nigerian Letter (also called the 419 fraud, Nigerian scam, Nigerian bank scam, or Nigerian money offer[2]),[3] the Spanish Prisoner, the black money scam as well as Russian/Ukrainian scam (also extremely widespread, though far less popular than the former). The so-called Russian and Nigerian scams stand for wholly dissimilar organised-crime traditions; they therefore tend to use altogether different breeds of approaches.

and further defines the “419″ as this:

The number “419″ refers to the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code (part of Chapter 38: “Obtaining Property by false pretences; Cheating”) dealing with fraud.[6] The American Dialect Society has traced the term “419 fraud” back to 1992.[7]

The 419 scammers count on your lack of knowledge to trick you into believing their scams are true by using freely available information from news, media and other sources.
They use this lack of knowledge to sucker you into the scam and use delay tactics to get more money but return nothing in kind.

So please educate yourselves and apply these simple rules to protect against these vermin of humanity:

1. If you didn’t ask for or solicit an email from anyone that you don’t recognize, it’s a scam. That goes for emails asking for information from sites you might be familiar with to solicit information from you. i.e. paypal, msn, banking, credit cards, etc.

2. your mom or dad or even your stock broker probably told you this: If it’s too good to be true it probably is!!

3. Never, never, never answer an email from a scammer. Don’t ask to be on an opt-out list from them. This will verify to them that you are a real human on the receiving end of the email and they will hit you again from another angle.
There is nothing wrong with reading it (however, don’t open any attachments with it) but use your common sense about it.
If you feel insecure about even reading it, send it to the trash immediately.

4. Use good judgment in visiting websites. If you go to or get redirected to a questionable website close the browser and all open windows immediately and reopen a new one.

5. Sign up with a good webmail site, gmail is a good one and use it’s spam filtering tools. Although none are completely secure from this. stay away from Yahoo and MSN for important emails.
I use these services strictly for my “dumping grounds” emails, like notifications from my social blogging sites, etc. never to conduct confidential business.