E-MAIL SCAM TARGETS CAPITAL POT ADVOCATE

A well-known Victoria pot advocate learned yesterday that someone was
hitting up the contacts in his e-mail directory and scamming them for
cash.

An e-mail that looked like it came from Ted Smith, organizer of weekly
marijuana "smoke-ins" around the city, was sent early yesterday to
thousands of Smith's contacts, begging for cash to get him out of a
sticky situation overseas.

"I'm pretty upset," said Smith, a principal of International Hempology
101 Society, yesterday. "This is causing us all sorts of headaches,
that's for sure."

The subject line read "I need your help urgently," and the message
indicated Smith was stuck in Nigeria, where he was attending one of
three conferences. It said he had left his wallet in a taxi and needed
$2,000 cash to pay hotel bills and travelling expenses.

"I need this help so much and on time because I am in a terrible and
worried situation here," said the message.

The e-mail said Smith would be thrown in jail if his bills were not
paid, and promised repayment upon his return home. It asked recipients
to send the money to Lagos, Nigeria, via Western Union, which doesn't
leave a paper trail and is popular with fraud artists.

But Smith is in Victoria, not Africa. Yesterday, he found himself
deluged with phone calls from people asking about the e-mail,
wondering if it was a hoax.

"I think I know what happened," Smith said amid the flurry of calls.
"One of the employees yesterday accidentally gave out our e-mail
password when he shouldn't have and now we're being scammed. I'm
having a hard time calling Gmail [e-mail service provider] because
everyone else is calling me.

"Pretty much everyone would recognize it as a hoax right
away."

People should be wary of Internet-based messages asking for personal
information such as secret access codes, said Sgt. John Price of
Saanich police, who suggests checking fraud-related websites such as
phonebusters.com, fraud.org and IC3.gov.

"There are always scams cropping up," said Price. "In this day and
age, everybody should know they shouldn't open up unsolicited e-mails
anyway.

"I've received these types of scams at my work e-mail. If it's
unsolicited, delete it. If it's a friend or a colleague, they'll send
you another one or they'll phone you and say, 'Hey, how come you
didn't respond to my e-mail?'"

Mayo McDonough of the Better Business Bureau of Vancouver Island said
the number of e-mail scams is increasing -- even the BBB was targeted
by a "phishing" scam that went out looking like complaint notices.
"Phishing" is when con artists attempt to acquire information such as
usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a
trustworthy entity.

Smith's contacts included "everybody we've e-mailed for years," he
said, estimating the number to be in the hundreds or even thousands.

The password was given in response to an e-mail that looked like a
legitimate communication from the e-mail service provider Gmail.

"People should know there's Gmail scam going on and you can't trust
what's being sent out from Gmail," said Smith, who has since requested
that his e-mail account be shut down.

The stilted tone of the e-mail was a dead giveaway that it wasn't
legitimate, he said.

"One of my friends said ,'You write a lot better than that. I knew it
wasn't you for sure.'"