I’m always shocked by the transparency of most email scams—the most famous one now making the rounds, of course, being the so-called “Nigerian Scam,” in which an heir of Mobutu Sese Seko or some other foreign thug offers to share an obscene amount of money with you if you’ll just give him access to your bank account or wire a transfer fee. But they persist, so we know that, at least occasionally, they must work. A totally ineffective scam wouldn’t have lasted this long, after all. A Czech victim of that grift made headlines recently by shooting a Nigerian consular official when he was (reasonably enough) told that when a fool and his money are parted, there’s not much the Nigerian government can do to reunite them.

Another one I’ve received recently is slightly slicker. A variant version of the con, which attempts to get you to part with your e-Gold login and password in order to prevent your “inactive account” from being erased, has also been around for a while. This one rather cleverly makes use of HTML email to lift e-Gold’s icons right from their own site, making it look more legitimate, and places the login form directly in the email itself. Now, not only do I not have an e-Gold account, I know no reputable business would actually ask you to submit your password this way, so I checked out the message source. Here, too, the scammer is fairly clever. (Though probably needlessly so—anyone who’d bother to check the source isn’t going to fall for something like this.) The address to which it actually sends your information isn’t spelled out normally; it’s written in that percent-sign-plus-number code that browsers read. If you translate it, though, you see that it’s actually shunting your info to the email address e-gold.com@ronald112.hypermart.net. I’ve apprised the good folks at Hypermart, of course, but the chances that the scammer used any of his real information when signing up are basically nil, and he can surely find another account in short order. Actually, this kind of scam makes it particularly easy to do that, since you can just log in to the account of a recent victim and then pay for your new account in e-Gold. Despicable, but also ingenious. That’s the flip-side to the benefits of anonymous electronic currency, of course: the same features that enable you to make transactions online without being traced make it equally easy for a scammer to do the same with your hijacked account without being caught. Since there are now plenty of valuable services to be purchased online, one can extract plenty of value without ever surrendering any physical address to which ill-gotten goods are shipped.