Spam Emails Sent to Forum Members
Several members of my forum (me included!) have recently received emails from someone purporting to be a member of Mywriterscircle.com asking them for help in moving large sums of money out of an African country, in exchange for a cut of the profits.
This is - as you may know - a scam that has been doing the rounds for some years. Surprisingly people do still fall for it, however, and end up paying thousands of dollars supposedly to cover bribes, customs fees, and so on. It's called Advance Fee Fraud, and takes a wide variety of forms, as discussed in this Wikipedia article. So please, if you get a message of this nature, just delete it. Or, if you're feeling public-spirited, report it to your email provider and/or the email provider of the sender.
It appears that the fraudsters have "harvested" members' email addresses from their profile pages on the forum, so I would strongly recommend all members of Mywriterscircle.com to select the option to HIDE their email address from the general public. I have explained exactly how to do this in this forum post.
To reduce the risk of spam, it is highly advisable NEVER to publish your main email address on the Internet. If you do need to publish an email address for people to contact you, use a free web-based service such as Hotmail, or a dedicated anti-spam service such as Sneakemail (which I use). The latter, which is free to try out, lets you create temporary "disposable" email addresses, which you can easily change when they start getting spammed.
To emphasise again, whoever is doing this is NOT a member of Mywriterscircle.com. If they were, we would of course ban them. They are simply fraudsters, and the best advice is to ignore them and/or install a spam filter such as Spam Bully to try to block their emails from reaching you. You might also like to check out my Stop Spam Email website, which has a lot more advice on preventing and dealing with email spam.
This is - as you may know - a scam that has been doing the rounds for some years. Surprisingly people do still fall for it, however, and end up paying thousands of dollars supposedly to cover bribes, customs fees, and so on. It's called Advance Fee Fraud, and takes a wide variety of forms, as discussed in this Wikipedia article. So please, if you get a message of this nature, just delete it. Or, if you're feeling public-spirited, report it to your email provider and/or the email provider of the sender.
It appears that the fraudsters have "harvested" members' email addresses from their profile pages on the forum, so I would strongly recommend all members of Mywriterscircle.com to select the option to HIDE their email address from the general public. I have explained exactly how to do this in this forum post.
To reduce the risk of spam, it is highly advisable NEVER to publish your main email address on the Internet. If you do need to publish an email address for people to contact you, use a free web-based service such as Hotmail, or a dedicated anti-spam service such as Sneakemail (which I use). The latter, which is free to try out, lets you create temporary "disposable" email addresses, which you can easily change when they start getting spammed.
To emphasise again, whoever is doing this is NOT a member of Mywriterscircle.com. If they were, we would of course ban them. They are simply fraudsters, and the best advice is to ignore them and/or install a spam filter such as Spam Bully to try to block their emails from reaching you. You might also like to check out my Stop Spam Email website, which has a lot more advice on preventing and dealing with email spam.
Nick at 2:51 AM 
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