Bamboo - I just posted a blog about this and then saw your question! I received a couple sometime in the last few hours. Very annoying when these slip through.

Just got another one, exactly the same, they seem to be coming in every hour or 45 minutes. I hope the site masters block her soon, or my inbox will be full tomorrow...

Bamboo, for the past week I have been receiving Spam in my personal email account from some weird and wonderfully named 'Ladies', inviting me to buy enlargement pills for an appendage I don't have! There were thirty seven of them of them one morning. :o(((

yes Bamboo I have just had 3, deleted all of them and suggest others do as well

Yes Bamboo I have had 3 , deleted them.Suggest you do what I do and only give out your email address to people you know,kerryvw

I dont know how effective it will be but I have just put an adblock on her? Time will tell, kerryvw

Yea, I deleted it immediately. Sooner or later those Sudan messages lead to your credit card or bank account. Next time I get one I'll flag it which I should have done in the first place.

Shirley on your email account put these messages into your Junk file and then they will be dealt with without you seeing them, you can also block them too.

Shirley - if you do buy any of those enlargement pills, can you forward them to me please? :-)

Certainly Andrew ... just PM me your address! LOL!!!!!

Kerry Adblock works for me (except for those Chinese blogs advertising fashion stuff)

Loose strife,I have flag!d the one in the comments box on my photo of Pip but cannot seem to delete it? Any ideas anyone,have tried right clicking mouse but no delete on there,kerryvw

I have had 2 of these today. Both deleted straight away.

I have just received one in my PM's, I've flagged it, never had a weird one of that nature before so wasn't sure whether to delete it and ignore but decided to flag it instead....Should I also delete it out of my inbox now or leave it for admin. to deal with??

Got an answer from Lincslass re. my problem,worked perfectly,suggest you keep personal info.on your profile to a minimum and dont put your email address down.ID theft is rife,if they can ,they will,kerryvw.

Lincslass - I deleted all but one, because I flagged it, and I'm not sure whether the powers that be need to see the message in order to deal with it.

Mine's in my private messages, which means adblock is not going to work, as far as I know.

And Kerryvw - I have not responded to any of the messages either on here or via my own email, and wouldn't dream of doing so. And unless they're able to access my personal profile on here, which I doubt very much, they won't have access to my email address (and even if they did, the one I use for this site is only used for gardening stuff, so no use to anyone). These messages are really only a nuisance, not a threat to your security.

These are scammers, probably a man. If you communicate with them they will will give you a sob story about living in a refugee camp or some other hard luck story. They will probably tell you that they have been left lots of money by a family member but can't get it out of the country and need your help. They will send you pictures of a beautiful young girl purporting to be them, but they will be of some innocent person stolen from the internet.

They will inevitably require you to transfer some cash via western union to a fictitious barrister or some other co-scammer. Of course there is NO inheritance and they will keep asking you for more money for various other unexpected payments until they have got as much as they can from you.

They target hundreds of people with the hope of hooking one or two vulnerable people. They are nasty thieving scumbags that prey on the vulnerable and will empty your bank account.

How do I know this? Well for the past 3 years a group of us have been playing along with these scumbags and pretending to go along with them. This gives us lots of amusement, wastes their time and hopefully keeps them busy and away from other victims. It's quite satisfying to give them the run-around, get them to show up at Lagos airport to meet you after telling them your coming over with a suitcase full of money. I've even got them to send one of their cronies that lives in London to meet me at a place that I arranged and sat at home watching them for three hours on a web cam at Trafalgar Square or some other public webcam.

After we have played with them for a while, sometimes months, or they smell a rat, we let them know that they have been baited and publish all the email communications on the internet. Some of them make hilarious reading such is their greed.

Google Scambaiting for some good reading.

Well done Myron, Derek.

I gather we all had the same pm Bamboo, none today it seems, thank goodness..I was going to leave it after flagging it but noticed most members said to delete it so I'm afraid I went back and did...

Made me smile Myron.

Made my skin crawl at first when I read the pm but then it got my back up bit like that other nonsense we get sometimes, have to admit I was relieved to come on and see this query, sort of safety in numbers kind of thing if you know what I mean...
Myron the trouble is how many poor folk get suckered in by this sort of thing, makes my blood boil and its against our guidelines to say what I really would like to say...

If you read the stories from these vulnerable people that have fallen prey and lost all their life savings to these thieving lowlife it will make you weep. There must be many other victims that have kept quiet because they are too embarrassed or afraid to admit that they were duped.

People often say that if a person replies to someone that they don't know offering them vast amounts of money and they get conned then they have nobody else to blame but themselves for being greedy. But these scam victims are usually elderly or confused people that think they are helping someone that's in a bad situation.

Most of these scam emails originate from Nigeria or the Ivory coast. I have baited hundreds of scammers over the years and most of the emails come from the same IP address, indicating that it's the same internet cafe and in some instances probably the same scammer.

Although the authorities in these countries say they are clamping down on this type of crime little is done. The scammers use internet cafes behind closed doors which are locked after 10 p.m. just for them to carry out their devious exploits. this is because the police have a habit of raiding the internet cafes, not to arrest them but to rob them of their mobile phones and take a cut of any money that they may have made.

Our own government and police are equally disinterested in tackling this epidemic. On numerous occasions I have supplied the police with detailed information of scammers accomplices living over here and asked the police to take action against them. I have forwarded them all the emails, IP addresses, phone numbers and even photos of them which I have captured from web cams.

Their reply is nearly always the same... They thank me for bringing this to their attention and tell me that they haven't the resources to deal with it, or that until someone actually gets scammed and sends money there's nothing they can do. I usually reply to them sarcastically and say that they they seem to find the resources to send a helicopter up if a motorist is reported speeding, and ask them would they tell a bank that reported a robbery in progress that they couldn't send the police until the money was handed over?

In America it's a different story. I once baited a scammer and subsequently found out that he had an accomplice in California. I emailed a fellow scambaiter over there and sent him all the information I had. He contacted the authorities and they arrested him within hours. A month later my friend told me that the scammer had been charged with various other related offences, jailed for 2 years and he will be deported after release... No such thing as article 8 of the human rights act in The USA.

Myron,well done mate.Saw a program about people like you setting up these scum,they were to meet them in a remote place on the Southwest coast to hand over the money,which meant they had to get a train from London and a taxi from the station.When confronted he denied everything.They should have knocked seven bells out of him.The trouble is most of us are too trusting and they play on our good nature,you just have to be extra vigilant. If they have access to this site then I assume they have access to everyone on it and obviously flora and fauna are at the bottom of their list of priorities,but these are clever conmen and I think very carefully before opening or replying to emails of unknown origin,cynical and suspicious possibly, but thats in response to the world we live in,anyway lets get back to talking about plants,kerryvw

Bamboo I had same. I responded by saying I was more than happy to talk via GoY PM's only. Of course heard no more, then flagged it with Admin. (Dave).

Bamboo, thanks very much for asking the question!

Myron .. Top man thank you. I'll certainly have a look at Scambaiting on the I/Net.

What strikes me as hilarious about it is the chosen name - shortymama - I mean, its hardly appealing is it, conjures up images of a short, dumpy woman, large arms akimbo, probably over an apron, in house slippers, with 17 kids of varying ages knocking about... Or maybe it's just me who gets that image;-)

17 kids fathered by various contacts in several countries over the internet maybe?

Doubt it Andrew - its the dollars and pounds they're interested in...

LOL, you beggar Bamboo, I now have a perfect image in my mind of the lovely fat slave in Gone With the Wind and I haven't watched that film in donkey's years...

Bamboo, they use names like that because they either stupidly believe that these types of names are terms of endearment over here that will give them more credibility, or they use names that are a bit of a joke in the country where they live to have a laugh at us with other co-scammers.

When I communicate with them I obviously don't use my real name and adopt an equally silly persona which hopefully they don't twig. I use names like, Hugh Jass, Doug Spollacks, Dew Von-Terplay, etc. I often use the names that actors have used, like Borat, played by Sacha Baron-Cohen because I can get lots of pictures off the internet to send the scammers for credibility.

I once baited a scammer for ages using the persona Derek Trotter. After 7 months of playing with him he sent me an email which simply said, "You are a plunker". He must have become suspicious, Googled the name and found me out. I emailed him back and said, "It's PLONKER, which is what you are because I've been having a laugh with you and wasting your time and money all this time. He threatened to put a curse on me, sue me and tell the police about me. I'm still alive, not been sued, and not had a visit from the police yet. LOL.

Lincslass; yea, not sexy is it... although you never know what floats someone's boat...

Myron: I wouldn't have the patience for it!