I'm very interested by what you say, treewind, about passwords. My email account has a very complex password. I'm quite proud of it as it was certified as 'Very Strong'. I was told by my savvy neighbour to use lower and upper case letters mixed in with random numbers. So I imagine it's my friends whose account was hacked; maybe their password is rather easy to guess. It's a bit simplistic IMO to say most scams originate in Nigeria. As you say, they could be from anywhere on the planet. We just have to be vigilant and not give any details away. My friend who's a volunteer for AgeUK is always telling the elderly callers not to be bamboozled like this.