What's the deal with e-mail scams?

PriceWatch has won the lottery on six occasions in the last fortnight. Official-looking messages telling us of our remarkable good fortune have come flooding in from lottery companies all over the world and jackpots have been scooped in Australia, the US, Britain and Spain and, of course, Ireland.

And if we're not winning the lottery, our name is being plucked from some "register of good persons" in Nigeria or Sierra Leone where we are listed as a person of "sufficient trustwordiness" (sic) to come to the aid of the widow of an African dictator who's been left with nothing but two huge trunks of US dollars which she needs to shepherd out of the country using our bank account.

ON OCCASION, PRICEWATCHhas replied to these mails using the e-mail address anaiveeejit@hotmail.com just to see how long the scammers can themselves be scammed. The best chain to date has been 18 e-mails, six long phone calls from Amsterdam to an Irish mobile phone number and one futile visit by a man known only as Mr Anderson to Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, where he expected to meet E'ejit off a flight from Dublin.

While the vast majority of scam e-mails and letters are ludicrously transparent, a growing number are worryingly plausible and more targeted. A listener recently contacted the Ray D'Arcy radio show, on which PriceWatch acts as consumer agony uncle, to complain that she had received a call to her mobile out of the blue offering a tax refund from a working holiday overseas. All she needed to do was forward her bank details to the caller via e-mail.

When the listener declined to send her details and instead suggested collecting the cheque in person, the caller who knew her name, number and her whereabouts in 2001 grew more reticent and said she would have to check with her boss and get back to her, which never happened.

After the item was aired, another man contacted PriceWatch to report two even more elaborate attempts which had been made to defraud him. Mark Donoghue works as a freelance massage therapist and has a website on which his e-mail address is published. Twice in recent months, he has received messages addressed to him personally. "They say that a football team or VIP client is coming to Dublin. They will need lots of treatments and would like to pay for them in advance."

The sender offers to forward a bank draft which will more than cover the price of the actual treatments at Donoghue's massage clinic. "The idea is that the recipient lodges the bank draft in their account and refunds the 'balance'," Donoghue says. "Your bank will lodge the draft into your account but several days later it's discovered that it is a fake. By this time you have sent the refund to the client, who, of course, never shows up."

Donoghue says he was suspicious when he got the first e-mail, so he Googled the name of the team. The search came up with a match so he proceeded, albeit cautiously. "I received a genuine-looking bank draft but because it was for several times the actual cost I rang the bank. They confirmed it was fake."

Donoghue's story backs up the contention from the deputy director of Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs (ODCA), Brendan Moylan, that "there is a scam out there for everyone" and that even the most rational, intelligent people can find themselves being duped.

Although there is little hard evidence as to how many people are affected by scams in this country, because many who are caught out are too embarrassed to come forward, the National Consumer Agency (NCA) and the ODCA estimate that they could be costing Irish people as much as €350 million each year and less than 5 per cent of that money is ever likely to be recovered.

One of the most common scams doing the rounds now purports to be from the Spanish lottery - PriceWatch has won it twice since the beginning of March. The colour printed letters were mailed from Spain and had they not been addressed to Mr Pope Conor, they would have been quite convincing.

This scam makes money by asking people to spend money on premium rate phone calls and admin charges, taxes and banking fees. Moylan describes the documentation as "absolutely phenomenal" and "of a standard that could fool anyone".

ONE THING ALMOSTall scams have in common is they stress the need to act now or miss out forever. "The sense of urgency is designed to make people think, 'maybe there is something in this'," says Moylan.

"That pressure and the fact that they have a small piece of accurate information about you can tip some people into responding. People are pushed into making illogical decisions." It is often those who are in serious financial difficulties who will be easiest to fool as desperate people are more prone to clinging to straws.

He believes that scams which use very specific information about the target may be on the rise. "I have absolutely no idea how they get some of the information they have on people. No one knows. It could from a totally innocuous form that you filled up months or years earlier that is then input into a database which is subsequently sold to a third party."

While Anaive E'ejit responds to scam e-mails, it is not something that is generally recommended as, once you give them even the most trivial piece of information you can expect to make your way on to a "suckers list" and have your e-mail box flooded with scams for as long as you live, so it is probably better to heed the NCA message that if something seems too good to be true, then it is too good to be true.