I recently put an ad in the classified section of Thai Visa and got a very strange response considering that I was only advertising a few paltry items that I had no need for. It was from a woman from Sierra Leonne who said that her Uncle had died ( a very venerable religious man) and had a large ammount of money which she would like to deposit in my bank account. For this I would be paid a large percentage of the cash involved which was not an incosiderable ammout. I have heard of these scams before, the idea I suppose is to get my bank account details then somehow raid it surely it a'int legit, and how on earth did she get ont the Thai Visa site and then the e-mal fowarded to me.

Any thoughts, has this happened to anyone else ( I presume it has, and how can we stop people being taken for a ride?

This scam (called the 419 scam after the law in Nigeria making it illegal) has been around forever, and you would have to be very stupid/greedy to fall for it. My hotmail account was fine until a month back, now I get these plus a lot of returned emails from addresses I don't know sayign that I had sent a virus to them. There's no virus on my system so I know that someone is using my address to spoof emails to other people - I suspect someone has a virus on a pc with my mail address in their address book.

A more clever one was an email I received after I had got several rejected emails from companies I didn't know. The email puported to be from Microsoft (the from address was account_manager@microsoft) telling me that they had noticed my email address was being used for spamming purposes and I needed to confirm my identity by entering my logon details, DOB etc into the form in the email and hitting the REPLY button. I didn't, but I can imagine a few people would.

Yep, it's happened before.. and probably will never stop.

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9553

Yep, it's happened before.. and probably will never stop.

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9553

I have just checked out that link and George said he had blocked it from the TV site in April, well it would appear that it is somehoe entering through the "back door" via the classified adverts. Can anything further be done George? I would hate to see someone get caught by this.

Yep, it's happened before.. and probably will never stop.

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9553

I have just checked out that link and George said he had blocked it from the TV site in April, well it would appear that it is somehoe entering through the "back door" via the classified adverts. Can anything further be done George? I would hate to see someone get caught by this.

Just ignore 'em and we'll wipe 'em as they turn up. Bloody nuisances.