I've noticed the past few weeks have seen an increase in emails from scammers, most of which offering me large sums of money in return for helping them smuggle money out of their country, which of course involves giving them enough personal details that they could steal your identity!

Some appear to have come from banks (some even appearing to be from MY bank) asking me to go to their website and confirm my details or my accounts would be suspended. If you're savvy and look at where the link is going it's quite obviously not to my bank's home page.

Some have said that I've won the lottery and they need my details as part of my claim.

Others are from so-called banks who've said that clients (and their entire families) have died in a disaster (most recently plain crashes, and one even said the most recent Hudson River crash, which we all know nobody died in!). These ones offer you a large percentage of many millions in return for saying you are a relative and claiming the money from their bank.

Others have been from people begging, with stories that do tug at your heart about losing loved ones because they need money for some organ transplant or their child has some rare disease that they cannot afford to treat.

One this morning came appeared to come from the Secretary General of the United Nations (complete with attached images that looked very official) and was informing me of a scheme they've just approved to compensate everyone in the world with US$500,000 !!!

I know we're all pretty savvy around here and I doubt any of us are silly enough to fall for these scams, but I feel a reminder of the dangers of responding to these emails could benefit some, especially as times get tougher and some of us might feel the pinch and be tempted by such offers.

They are all scams. Don't be gullible and fall for them. Simply mark the emails as spam (so your email program learns and should automatically do it in the future), or simply hit the delete button. Never click on a link or image (and if you can switch off the automatic display of images as these could be used to verify your email address by the scammers). Most banks have abuse email addresses that they publish on their web sites for you to forward any that appear to be from them, do it - it helps the bank shut down these criminals.

Some common things to look out for are if you look at the email address of the sender it's usually some free email account (gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc). No bank, no lottery and no Secretary General of the United Nations is going to send an email from such an account. Even if the email address appears legitimate, look at the full headers of the email if you're technical enough and look for the "reply-to" address as that's the real email address your response will be sent to.

These emails are mostly *very* polite (so sickly at times I want to reach for a bucket). They usually start off "dear friend", ask how you are, ask how your family is and end with god bless you and such. They also almost always contain bad grammar, spelling mistakes and the use of incorrect words. No official email is going to be so poorly written.

They usually involve some fictitious bank, generally somewhere in Africa but lately some say in Asia (more commonly China).

Some will ask for your personal details up-front but others don't. They almost always say that the matter is strictly confidential and that they require an urgent and/or immediate response.

Be on your guard and stay safe my friends