If you receive email from IRS with the instructions about how to receive stimulus payments, most likely that email is a phishing email. Wall Street Journal reports that scammers are sending such emails to steal your credit card information. These emails display photos of President Obama and Vice President Biden and claim to offer people their portion of stimulus package. As in all other phishing emails, if you click the link in the email you will be taken to fake website where your identity and/or credit card information will be stolen.

Federal Trade Commission says that the IRS never asks for personal information via email. If you receive any such email do not click any links in it. Forward such emails to phishing@irs.gov so that IRS can track the scammers.

It really is incredibly sad, but the truth of the matter is scams will likely be much more common during these rough economic times. As more and more people lose their jobs and are looking for some way to make money, scam artists see a perfect opportunity to sucker a lot of people into a really bad deal.

These scam artists that always like to prey on the elderly and those who are less likely to question their knowledge are now moving into a broader group of people and looking to prey on those who are having financial difficulty. In fact, last October the LA Times wrote about the recession being boom time for scammers. The Times article also points out several areas you should particularly watch out for scams. The scam artists promote some kind of scheme that says you will make some outrageous sum of money if you simply follow their advice, which we all know is just a code for “I’m going to take your money and run.” As the aforementioned article notes, please don’t fall for the home based business scams or the free lunch scams. The true fact of the matter is if someone is offering you a free lunch and guaranteeing you a huge amount of money they are likely either lying or exaggerating, and there is a fine line there.

The most important thing you need to do to avoid scams is be extra cautious and ask a lot of questions. A scammer doesn’t want you to ask them difficult questions because then you might get too much information and realize that it is a scam. Be slow to commit your money to any kind of investment or even any kind of charity until you have asked all the questions and done all the research to make sure it is legitimate. There is no free lunch out there, and don’t let anyone allow you to think there is!

“It’s easier to steal $1 from a million people than $1 million from one person” — Some crooks drafted a scheme to check out this concept. These guys started stealing 25 cents from each credit card customer. If you see strange credit charge of $0.25 or anything less than $1, it’s better to investigate where those charges are coming from.

When you sign up for online banking money transfer or paypal, they normally deposit a small amount to verify your account ownership. Because of that, it may be easy for anyone to ignore the small charges or deposits. Some crooks got creative and started stealing few cents from hundreds of thousands of people. These charges are shown up in credit card statements with the merchant name “Adele Services”. If you see anything like this, call your bank and alert them.

Source: Mysterious Credit Card Charges

Related Link: Complaints Board

I have been receiving emails from Nigeria since 1998. Every email claim that I am supposed to inherit few million dollars. These emails keep popping up even though I mark each and every one of them as spam in my yahoo account. Nigerian scammers keep sending these emails because people fall for them. The scammers are optimistic that even if they get 0.0005% response, they would easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I am sure that most of you have received the nigerian scam email. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you say “I am interested” to these scammers?

John Rempel, Leamington, Canada did just that. He quit his truck driving job and searched for $12.8 million bounty that never existed. He lost the total of $150,000 to the Nigerian scammers. You can read the complete story here.

Scammers play mind game. If you read the story of John Rempel, you will know how easily he was manipulated. Once the prey is caught in the net thrown by scammers, the prey conditions its mind to believe the hunters. All scammers succeed by sweet talk. John Rempel was naive and strongly believed that some stranger really left $12.8 million for him. I am surprised that even his family played along and lost all the money.