Along with John’s recommendations, I’ll also add
that there are a growing number of scammers on the internet, who are prowling a
number of websites such as craigslist and other “For Sale” or
“Wanted” websites waiting for someone to post that they are looking
to buy something. The scammers reply to the posting, saying
that “they have the desired item(s) in good and excellent
condition” (be wary of emails in which the sentences
seem choppy, generic, and/or are not in properly formed English). The
email often has a phone number and suggests that you can simply call them,
often giving a phone number and a made up street address which is based in the
UK. This number is often “+4470xxxxxxx”. Be
wary of this as the 4470 exchange in Britain belongs to a call forwarding
service which automatically forwards calls to anywhere in the world, concealing
the identity of the person and is frequently used by scammers.
Also, if you receive a questionable looking email and have
the ability to look in the header of the email, it will have the IP address of
the Internet service provider where it originated.
One can simply go to this network tools website (link below)
and enter that number and it will trace/lookup the information and tell you
where in the world the message came from. In this example below,
the email traced came from Nigeria, probably the global center of scam
operations and Nigerian princes looking to give you millions of dollars if you
simply use Western Union to wire them a few hundred bucks…
http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=lookup&host=41.211.234.17
Be careful out there!
Mike Fugere