It can be quite unnerving to find an e-mail in your inbox from someone claiming to be a hit man who’s been hired to kill you — especially if he lists your address and the names of your spouse and children.
Odds are you’ve got nothing to worry about: The note is one of the latest e-scams circulating through cyberspace. The e-con artists — usually firing off their threats from the other side of the planet — use information that’s free and easy to find on the Internet to make threats seem more credible.
“When you open this e-mail, you feel a little bit more like it’s specifically aimed at you,” said FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko.
Kolko said he’s never heard of anyone actually paying off the “hit man,” though he suspects that the rare victims might be too embarrassed to report that they fell for the ploy.
Even though the details lend an air of authenticity, authorities say many of the e-mails are not very sophisticated.
“Someone you call a friend wants you Dead by all means, and the person have spent a lot of money on this,” one e-mail posted on Fraudwatchers.org explained. “As I am writing to you now my men are monitoring you and they are telling me everything about you.
.. As someone has paid us to kill you.
“Get back to me now if you are ready to pay some fees to spare your life …”
The “hit man” then asks the message’s baffled recipient: “Now do you want to LIVE OR DIE?” and suggests that he will cancel the contract in exchange for a sum between $5,000 and $150,000.
The hit-man message is the latest generation of e-mail scams, but it’s not the most insidious, nor is it the most successful.
Most scam e-mails use the victims’ own greed against them –…