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I must be the luckiest person in Virginia. Why, just this month I have won 2 million pounds sterling in the UK Coventry lottery, 300,000 pounds sterling in the UK Lotto and 450,000 pounds sterling from the Heineken Worldwide Lottery. I am so lucky that these lotteries, which include every e-mail address in existence, all drew mine! I didn't even have to enter the contest, that's how lucky I am!

In addition, my honest reputation is apparently known worldwide. This month I have been approached by a "foreign account manager" of Standard Bank in London, who needs the help of an honest American to claim the $20 million inheritance of an American family that died tragically in Kenya. I will be awarded 35 percent for my help ($7 million). I have also come to the notice of the Ministry of Housing in Shenzhen, the National Security Adviser to the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the Agricultural Research Institute of Northern Ireland. They all know how reliable I am and want me to help them in projects ranging from transporting gold dust to being a cash courier to help fund research into rare plants.

After I finish counting my winnings and planning what to do with all those millions of dollars, though, I notice that all of these generous but strangely helpless officials use Yahoo for their e-mail. Yahoo does provide a valuable and generally reliable free e-mail service, but it seems rather odd that a Ministry of Housing wouldn't have its own mail server.

In reality, of course, it isn't odd at all that they use Yahoo, because none of these offers is legitimate. Yahoo allows anyone to make an e-mail address instantly, without having to have any other e-mail address or the slightest proof of who you are. If I were to respond to any of these messages, the first thing the mysterious person on the other end would want to know are my bank account numbers. Then that person would want me to send some money to cover the cost of the wire transfers of all that cash into my accounts or to "release" my prize. If I were as trusting as I am honest and actually gave them the keys to my bank account, I would quickly find myself cleaned out. These people don't know me from Eve; they just bought a CD with a million e-mail addresses on it from some other criminal and spewed their come-ons to all of them. Even if they have a return rate of only 0.001 percent, they still will be making some money. And people do get taken by these cons every year, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars worldwide.

There are some more subtle variations on the scam. If you use a resume service such as monster.com or careerbuilder.com, you may find yourself receiving e-mails claiming to be from legitimate companies. They offer easy work that you can do from home, helping them "complete sales," transfer funds or reship packages. They may provide a URL to their Web site so you can check them out. These sites may look professional -- they should, because they are often copied from real sites and reposted under a slightly different URL, maybe adding a hyphen or transposing a word. But don't be tempted. What they are really doing is trying to recruit you as a "money mule," someone who helps them launder stolen money. You might also be shipping stolen goods or helping them defraud people on eBay. You might make some money, but you will be making yourself an accomplice to a crime. You are much more likely to be left holding the bag yourself than you are likely to get rich. You might get an angry e-mail from an eBay user asking when she is going to receive her computer that she bought from you. You might get law enforcement at your door.

None of these cons is really new. The I-need-help-moving-millions-of-dollars-out-of-Africa con is commonly known as a 419 scam, so called because 419 is the section of the Nigerian criminal code that deals with fraud. But it has an ancestor known as the Spanish prisoner con, which dates back at least to the early 1900s. In this confidence trick, the trickster tells the mark (the trick-ee) that he is working for a wealthy person who has been imprisoned in Spain under a false name. The prisoner can't reveal his true identity to the prison or he will be killed. If he can raise enough money to bribe the guards, the prisoner will be freed and will handsomely pay the person who assisted in the release. It's hard to believe that anyone ever fell for such a convoluted and romantic story, but greed is a strong motivating force that sometimes makes people disregard good sense. The Internet simply makes it much easier to run these cons. The person running the con no longer has to rely on personal charm and doesn't have to meet the mark face-to-face. The trickster can spam millions of people. He can use hacked computers to run the Web sites that give a semblance of legitimacy to the offers. He can dump any compromised e-mail address and instantly get a fresh one for the next round of cons.

The moral of the story is, no matter how lucky, honest or deserving you are, you can't really win a lottery without entering it and moving money for strangers is a bad idea. As Robert Heinlein liked to put it, "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." (TANSTAAFL) If it looks too good to be true, too easy to be real, it probably isn't either.

Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.