During this past week I received about twenty offers to become a millionaire. Craigslist will give me a DVD, usually a $99.95 valu,e just for paying the postage on the disk. I had only 15 minutes to make up my mind. If I accepted their offer, I could start making $500 to $1000 every day and have fun doing it. Someone else is selling the secrets of becoming an instant eBay dealer.

Those offers are not so bad; at least they are legitimate deals. Very few participants will make much money but so far as I know they are legal and won't cost you a lot to participate. The offer I have a problem with comes in emails from people I don't know and almost invariably begin, “My dear or my precious friend.” They always involve informing me of the death of someone who has left tons of money that they don't know what to do with, so they have looked me up to help them out. The prize may vary from 500,000,000 rupees to half a million dollars, All I have to do is send them my life story and pay them some earnest money before they will deposit this fortune in my bank account.

This extract from describes the operation: “Watch out for people who say you've won contests or lotteries that you never entered, have funds for you from a transaction that you never arranged, that you have won a prize but you need to pay for the shipping, or who say they need your credit card or other financial information in order to complete the transaction.

“There are hundreds of other variations on those themes and, according to the U.S. Secret Service, thousands of people who have lost hundreds of millions of dollars. The Secret Service receives an average of 100 phone calls and 300 to 500 pieces of correspondence per day about the advance fee scams and says that in 2001, there were reports from 2,600 Americans who said they'd been scammed. Sixteen of them lost more than $300,000. Many people who've lost money don't report it.

“In August, 2006, Fox news reported that a Nigerian Advance Fee scam may have been a part of the money troubles between Tennessee minister Matthew Winkler and his wife Mary, who is accused of killing Matthew, allegedly after a heated argument about finances.”

Just remember that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is false and you should run as fast as possible away from it. A lot of people have learned this the hard way and lost a lot of money. They were willing, like old Jake, to pay a thousand dollars to be one of them millionaires. They never saw their money again. Life does not have to be like that.