I think I know what has happened here!   Matt has deleted a lot of messages sent by someone trying to con money out of members.   Thankfully a couple of members had the good sense to read the message, know there was something amiss and report them to the Mods and Matt.   Basically it's the old favourite, they've got money but can't get it out of the country and can they use your account etc to get money or can they send you a cheque and you send them back money less some for yourself etc etc.   Can I please make it very clear that if you receive any message along these lines or you aren't sure CONTACT a member of staff so we can check them out. DO NOT respond to the message.   Cheers Di.                                                                                                                                                                             

Thats shocking! Mind you, think I'll try that one myself, I'm skint, donations to...   There really are some two hats in this world...                                                                                                                                                                              

I've had dozens of 'em, though not through this forum. The 'delete' button works wonders   If you wanna show off your knowledge, it's called a Nigeria 419 scam in the trade.    http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/nigeria.asp                                                                                                                                                                             

Like your link said Wills, this scam has been going for years and yet it still traps people!!   This is one of the very reasons we don't allow email addresses on profiles. We can get rid of private messages and block the person responsible from accessing the site but if they get your email address it's out of our hands.   If you get a pm like this or any other that's dodgy please let the Moderators know about it.                                                                                                                                                                             

Its the first time I've come across something like that, but fortunately I was suspicious straight away!   The one I received was from a young girl age 20 who needed help getting hold of $1000,000. dollars after her family and cocoa plantation were attacked by rebels in Africa! Her father had passed over all documentation for this money to her before dying after the attack. but she needed help in getting it as it was in this country in a security company! With my help putting it into a sound business in this country I would receive 15% of the total!....yeah right!   I hope nobody has been sucked into this scam x                                                                                                                                                                             

if you fall for this kind of scam though, u deserve to loose ur money and i hope the banks dont pay you back.  If people keep falling for something so stupid, it only gives the scammers more reason to continue.  If everyone had some common sense, then they'd have no point in continuing.   I do really appreciate it when people tell me this is going on.  I can't spot them all.  There used to be lots of it going on, until people had to start paying to send PMs.  By requiring a paypal account (to pay your subs here) you have to register all your details including address and bank account etc.  This enables us to report the incident to the police.   On this particular instance, nearly 300 PMs were sent out today by this idiot.  I'll be looking into reporting it to the police.   It's so important that you report this kind of incident to the moderators group as soon as you can though, we can't spot them all and the sooner they're flagged up the sooner I can deleted all of them.   Thanks so much everyone, and sorry the odd one gets through the net                                                                                                                                                                             

  I knew I shoulda read the forums afore my mail lol. Mystery solved about spam.   Matt I've contacted you via the contact page re: the member's PM.   ALL those who got a spam PM set up a spare mail box and send  ALL the spam back to the address they gave you.                                                                                                                                                                                     

im gonna create a spam email address. There will be no mailbox attached to it, just an auto-responder with a polite message.  :-)                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

I normaly tell 'em to eff off.Sod being polite