Our daughter recently was a victim of the same scam, except it was done through her Facebook account. She didn't know until Facebook removed her page and is still waiting for a response from Facebook. Our son said it was done through use of a "bot", since all money requests were done at the exact moment (1 pm), and all people linked to her page who happened to be online at that time received a money request. Kathy Bevier In a message dated 2/26/2010 11:52:57 A.M. Central Daylight Time, steveds@heroldtech.com writes: Scam Warning!!! A couple of subscribers to the list recently received a message from a former subscriber stating how he was someplace in Europe and had been robbed and needed money to get back home. The person is no longer a Banat subscriber so the email message to the list bounced. This a scam that has been going on for a couple of years. Somehow the email address for a person is hijacked....someone gets control of the address and password, changes the password and can do an amazing amount of damage given what they find in the email and email address book that are stored on a server....NOT your local PC. These messages will generally originate from addresses such as yahoo.com, gmail.com and hotmail.com. Never respond to the message....the person is either already aware of the problem or will not be able receive your message since he/she has been cut off from their email because the password was changed. Sending a message to them only gives the hijacker a live email address. I've seen a couple of these this year and three last year. In the last case I knew the person and called him. He was already aware of the hijack and was jumping through all kinds of hoops trying to minimize the damage. A good way to reduce the possibility of one of these hijackings is to make certain you use a strong password, i.e., one which contains at least one or two upper case letters and one or two numbers. And including a special character such as ! or # will also make it stronger. Also make certain that you do not store passwords in any messages that are left on the server. You can imagine the damage a person could do knowing the passwords to your bank account. Steve ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to BANAT-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message