Recently, some fraudsters have sent a new scam email pretending to be from Alibaba.com. They claim that you can win a big prize and asking you to give your personal information and follow their instructions to get the prize. Once you contact these "organizers," they tell you that you have to pay a fee in order to transfer the money. Another tactic is to ask you for your bank information so they can deposit the money in your account. You get deeper and deeper into the scam as the money supposedly gets closer and closer to your account in a bank. However, they always claim they can’t continue unless they get more money or more private information from you.

Obviously, you should ignore any message like this. If you've been defrauded and have sent personal information or money to these scammers, you should assume that your private information has been stolen by criminals.

Here is an example of the scam email:

From: "Alibaba Alert"
To: xxxxxx@yahoo.com

Dear Alibaba User,

We wish to inform you that you have won the sum of Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Euros in today's Buyer Access Draw held in our office in Hong Kong .

Your user name emerged as the final winner .We also wish to inform you that your cash prize is ready to be collected from the sponsoring bank in London, United Kingdom.

Send your User Id, Company name, contact telephone numbers (Mobile and Landline), Fax number, bank name and email address to our Approved Cash Agent, Mrs. Michelle Brown at her email; michellebrown2002@gmail.com.

She has been approved and assigned to you to assist you claim your Cash Prize from the Sponsoring bank in . Follow all her instructions and conditions as this have already been approved by the management of the Alibaba Group.

Any cash prize unclaimed by the 22nd of May 2009 will be cancelled.

Keep this information confidential to avoid jeopardizing your prize to a third party.

We have been informed that there are many fraudulent emails concerning this promo.

Therefore to confirm that this is a genuine message from The Alibaba Group, kindly check the sender of this email to make sure that this email is from info.win@alibaba.com.

You are not permitted to reply to this email. You can only contact your Cash prize agent. This is our precautionary measure to avoid any misuse of this promo.

Congratulations and keep this private until you claim your prize.

Hurry and make your dreams come true with Alibaba.com !

Yours Sincerely,

Mr. Ji Lee
Coordinator for Promo

Copyright Notice C 1999-2009 Alibaba..com Limited and/or its subsidiaries and licensors. All rights reserved.

Important Points:

1. Alibaba.com will never hold a Lottery of any kind
2. Most scam emails will begin with a general greeting such as "Dear Alibaba User." However, emails sent by Alibaba.com will always include a personalized greeting in the form of either your name or your Alibaba.com Member ID
3. Alibaba.com will never use an email like: info.win@alibaba.com

To learn more about fraud emails, please go to: http://news.alibaba.com/article/list/1/stop-scam-emails.html.

By the way they wrote the letter, you can tell it is a Nigerian. Try not be fooled by the fact that e-mail came from Britain, there are Nigerians operating in almost every country. In fact, Nigerians no longer prefer to do business from Nigeria as people are aware that Nigerians are trash in general. So, through their networks around the world, they do the scam to make you think that they are not Nigerians. One of the most obvious things to remember about a scam is confidentiallity. If Alibaba.com gave money away as a promo, they would want everyone to know about it, a promo is always about publicity. They would never want you to keep quite about money that they gave you. I have picked up so many Nigerian scams on Alibaba.com that I have become an expert at it. I can already tell by the language and grammar that they use, they are Nigerians. Always be aware, Nigerians are the parasites of our world, they will suck you dry while they live like 50cent / Eminem or Niggazz in the Hood

Thanks Mornay!

It is always important to do some research about who we are dealing with. But this is a clear scam message, remember to ignore and delete any message that is promising you unexpected money. Internet is the 21th century wild west and our intelligence is our only weapon to protect us.

It's worthy to take 5 minutes to read the wikipedia regarding this issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_fraud

so many bull S~~tters here wantin to be your freind, like i read your profile and became interested in you bull,

like some kind of bunny boiler you can bet your bottom dollar anyone here becomes interested in you

works only with us, dollar, watch out this place is awash with scammin theives, is true.

No wonder i never get any reply from anyone on this site for the past  3 months. You are dead sure mate, my country's image has been trashed and well damaged beyond repair, might take more than 20 yrs rectify though and this is still on the rise.

What you guyz should be thinking of is how u can conner them all the time like creating a safer and more secure way of making payments and always publicise any scam mail, as the one above.

Imagine me now, am looking to buy a motor bike on alibaba for personal use and am not getting any reply because i said am from nigeria... very sad i am.

Well i pray God will take control and deal with those involved from their genration to generation...

Regards to all...

Tomori

I receive about three to five letters stating I won 5 million dollars are some kind of transfer to my account etc bulls@#$. I don't know how these people have the dignity to do this Sh@!# and start off with My friend and finish with a GOD BLESS YOU note . They should be ashamed and shall be judged ultimately

Hey mornay_bence you are racist trash & should be buried  somwhere shallow. 

     there is no disputing the obvious which is that nigeria and nigerains have become notorious for fraud and fraulent mail of which i as a nigerian still get such mails daily.Be it as it may there are still a lot more geniune business men in nigeria. The ratio of these scammers to the general population is less than 0.5%.But as we all know that news on everything evil,bad or abnormal sell fast and gets the widest of coverage.

Hi Nija4ever, I agree with you that there are many serious businessmen in Nigeria. Nigeria is kind of trade center of Africa. However, we have a saying in China "a piece of mouse sh*t has made the whole pot of soup uneatable".

Dear Sr or Madam


should we label whole country because of some bad people?


I am in America now, I know that some americans that are racists should I label all americans racist too? for some bad apple put all other ones in the bin? are you a good one in your community  or just a trash racist?  certainly you stinks better than other humans if i can call you human.