Email Scam Examples

Scammers from all corners of the globe love that the Internet has brought them over a billion new potential fools to part with their money. (They don't even have to leave the house anymore.) New methods to scam people online are created every day. If someone is offering you something for nothing (or next to nothing) it's a scam. Here's a few things that tip us off about scam offers.

• You don't remember the person who emailed you and they claim to know you through something very general like "your site" or "your profile" (but they don't specify which site).
• The email asks you open an attachment you weren't expecting.
• Lots of poor grammar, bad punctuation, bad capitalization (all caps or no caps), and misspellings. Many scammers don't speak English as their first language, so they're using online translators or their best guess. However, we do receive plenty of legitimate emails with grammar problems, so it could be a legitimate sender who doesn't speak English natively.

Check out "What are phishing scams and how can I avoid them?" for more examples and how to unmask what link you're really clicking on in those emails. See "Scams on Craigslist and Ebay" if you plan to sell anything online.

Here are a few examples of the most common type of scams. A new scam set-up is invented every minute, so be on the look out for anything that sounds too good to be true.

• Information You Need Is Attached
• Free Love
• We Have Your Money
• You've Won
• I Have A Job For You (It's easy and pays well)
• Using Fear of Fraud to Commit More Fraud

Information You Need Is Attached

The scam email appears to come from a general source -- "your boss", Western Union, FedEx -- it tells you to open the attachment to read information you need. The compressed (.zip) file attached is a PC virus. The example below, which pretends to be from Facebook, has a PC Zeus Bot virus attached. It can't harm your Mac but can steal passwords from a Windows PC. The extra scary part about these threats for PC users is that only 9 out of 41 anti-virus solutions detected the virus, according to Gary Warner's testing. Email attachments are the most common way to spread viruses between PCs. Read more about our recommendations for which Mac users should consider anti-virus software.

Free Love

We Have Your Money

You've Won

I Have A Job For You (It's easy and pays well)

Using Fear of Fraud to Commit More Fraud

Published March 24, 2009 12:00 PM
Last modified on November 28, 2011 5:17 PM