has anynoe else had this email ive cut and paste below??- a teacher friend has had a simular one and says its going around- i responded and i got a reply asking for my bank details and address, please dont respond to it if you get it- please all be aware......

jenny....

Hello,
i am Frank Wood, i just email to confirm if my 14 & 17 years old
children can join you in your Piano music class.Their names are Sami &
Amina,thier first language is English and they are very good children. As a
beginners,they are just interested to learning the basics.I hope you can
accept them as your student?.

The course is very essentiall in my children's life.Here are the full
details of my children stated below....

1.Full name - are Sami & Amina Wood
2.Ages - 14 & 17 years respectively
3.Best hobby - study
4.Present level - beginners
5.Previous knowledge - schools
6.Rate of their skills/abilities in the following areas - fair
7.Their interested in taking this classes - basics
8.Thier first language - English
9.Group lesson/one on one

I will like you to assure me that you are going to take them in teach them
in a creative environment,and aim to provide thorough technical
grounding,and to encourage full Piano music expression for beginners as i'm
ready to pay all their neccessary expenses.I will want the lessons to hold
for 4 weeks(32hours) and i will like you to get back to me with the hour of
teaching and charges per hour.Hope to hear from you soon so that we can make
an arrangent on when to start lessons with you.

Best regards.

this is the reply i got to my email.............

Dear,
thanks for the information.I am okay with the charges,therefore i will
proceed on and get my children move down to UK for the class.So they will be
staying with my relative who resides in the UK and he will be taking good
care of them.Please i will need your full name,full address and phone number
so that i can get payment to you.
Thank you.

Please note that the only acceptable payment methods are either bank to bank
transfer or certified cheque (which must be drawn on a UK bank)

Some spammers think we were born yesterday! I delete such things straight away.

Morons

There have been threads about this. Try a search.

It's basically spammers, fraudsters, etc.

As I have friend who's relatives have paid for them to visit them in foreign countries and take lessons I do reply to some but certainly not all as plenty come through addressed primarily to other email addresses. So far not one seems to have been genuine. There's some dead easy give aways though.

Ask them where their supposed children will be staying and don't give away which town you live in. Plenty just say "your town" and in my case thats too vague for me to take any student on (I don't teach at home and live on the outskirks of a city). They also tend to avoid answering questions about what pieces the kids have been playing recently or even what genres they like (even a total beginner has a preference in what music they like). Also if they are genuine they should have no problem giving the money for you payment to the children's guardian to give to you.

The whole point of these scams is for them to either get hold of your bank details or they'll send a cheque in excess of the amount and ask for you to refund the difference before their cheque clears.

Maybe I'm too much of an optimist but then again I seem to only reply to them when I'm bored.

Personally I wouldn't reply at all. Some of these people want you to reply so they have confirmation that you do exist on the e-mail address that they sent to.

I would get 5 of these a day if my spam killer did not intercept them.

According to Which mag, the only way to stop these people is to report them. Suppose you get an email from schyster@con.com. We are supposed to report this to abuse@con.com.

The idea is to forward the offending scam attempt to the isp hosting the domain; according to Which, they all have an abuse reporting address beginning with 'abuse' and ending with the domain name. On receiving reports, the isp will investigate and shut down the scammer.

That is the theory. Until isp's really take spam seriously, it will continue. All we can do is continue to complain in this way.

Steve

Well this made me chuckle. The kids' first language may be English; the author's certainly isn't.

I had exactly the same email the other day! The wording and the kids' names are identical - the sender is different though!

Seems there's more than one person keen to get "lessons" for these kids

Amanda xxx