"Send $861 to claim your prize." (Online scams)

All of us have encountered or at least read about messages sent via email, postal mail, telephone, text message, or other means proclaiming interesting things. Among them are:

• "I'm your friend, and I'm stranded in London and need money for a flight home."
• You won some lottery conducted in a distant country by a major global corporation (such as Microsoft or Coca-Cola.)
• You are entitled to an inheritance from some recently-deceased foreign government official or other affluent figure, usually one that had your last name.
• "You have a parcel waiting to be picked up", even though you didn't order anything to be sent to you.
• You are presented with a link to a website that looks like a trusted online retailer or your bank, which asks you for your account details (phishing).
• Some stranger on your favorite social networking site (whether it be MySpace, Facebook, or Google+) sends you a friend request out of the blue saying something like "I'm moving to your area soon" and "I want to get to know you" (or somewhere along those lines.)
• You look for a date online and fall in love with with somebody, but when you ask to meet him/her, he/she says no and comes up with a variety of excuses as to why not (catfish).

There are many other dubious pitches sent to people that I haven't covered above, but they all have a common goal-to scam you out of something or otherwise get you into deep trouble.

When you respond to any of these unsolicited messages or requests, the response may vary, but there will be a common theme to such responses. Anything other than your intended goal can happen, including the following:

• "We need you to wire $2,923 (or some other high amount) via Western Union to cover taxes/courier fees/legal fees/UN clearance checks/etc."
• "We need your Social Security and (or) credit card number(s) for verification."
• "You have to travel to West/South Africa to sign the required papers in order to claim your money."
• The person you want to meet says you can't see them because of an "illness", "death in the family", "been in a serious accident", "got arrested while traveling to see you", "got held up by Customs", or even "going through cancer".

What kinds of online scams have you dealt with, past and present? How did you deal with them? Has someone you know been involved in an online scam?

The most common scam I've dealt with was random girls that I never heard of sending me friend requests on MySpace and Facebook, with form messages such as "I'm moving to your area soon" or "I moved to your area recently". These fake profiles all had photos showing teen/young adult women wearing raunchy and revealing attire. I rejected every single one of these requests, as there was no way I was going to deal with some strange girl that I never even heard of, and I'm sure they would have just used me for sex.
Now that I think about it, if I was foolish enough to even deal with these fake girls, I probably would have been scammed in some way-knowing of catfish incidents that I've seen discussed on Dr. Phil.
On the other hand, my dad regularly gets scam emails covering virtually all bases, including those I brought up above.

 

Reminds me of those old 468×60 web banners that said that same thing and flashed between different colors. They would typically say you won because you were the (insert number here)th visitor to the website you were viewing. I couldn't understand at the time how an ad server could determine that you were, say, the 1,000th visitor, especially since the same ad would be repeated on a later visit.