Despite what an email you may have received claims, Safia Gadhafi — the wife of Col. Moammar Gadhafi — does not want to give you several tons of gold (or several million dollars, for that matter). She — or whoever is posing as her — does however want to take some of your hard-earned cash.
Sophos reports that a Gadhafi-themed email scam is making its rounds again. Similarly to the one we saw earlier in the year, this one involves a scammer who poses as Gadhafi's wife and attempts to cajole a victim into forking over some money — by promising greater wealth.
The way this trick— dubbed a "Nigerian 419" scam — goes down is simple.
A scammer shares a sob story of some sort and then explains that he or she has a large amount of money which can't be accessed in any way — except with the help of the victim. Naturally, the victim needs to provide a good amount of personal information as well as some kind of upfront fee (usually explained to be a transaction or transfer fee) in order to free the money. In exchange, he or she will receive a significant portion of it as reward.
As you may guess: That reward never comes.
Instead the good samaritan never sees whatever money he or she sent the scammer again — and sometimes winds up the victim of identity theft as a bonus.
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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook. Oh, and she can be found on Google+, too.