[Moderator's note: Several people sent comments about this to the
FML. I'm choosing to post Risa's since it seemed the most low key
while providing enough information to get the point across :-) Many
people involved with ferrets received this scam e-mail. BIG]

An e-mail came to a ferret group I'm a part of that looked to be from
a well known shelter operator.

It started like this:

"I am sorry I didn't inform you before that am traveling to Africa for
a program called "Empowering Youth to Fight Racism, HIV/AIDS, Poverty
and Lack of Education and Animal rescue, this program is taking place
in three major countries in Africa which is Ghana, South Africa and
Nigeria .It as been a very sad and bad moment for me, because present
condition that Find myself is very hard for me to explain.

I'm stranded in Nigeria....."

It goes on to explain how this person lost their money and passport and
depserately needs money that they'll pay back to get back home. The
e-mail asks for money in this well known person's name. It sounded odd
and I did a quick search and came up with the following among others:

http://www.qctimes.com/multimedia/documents/071015_email_scam.pdf
http://www.aol.in/news/story/2007090100239012000008/index.html
http://colddesert.blogspot.com/2007/10/another-email-scam.html

I know this isn't ferret related, but someone got this person's e-mail
list it seems, and so a lot of ferret people will get the plea. Being
that it's a shelter operator (who we all would love to help) I wanted
to pass this along on the fml.

Risa

[Posted in FML 5764]