419 scams: How do you treat yours?

Less than two per cent of email users who have received the infamous 419 scam email have reported the matter to the relevant authorities.

Meanwhile only 38 per cent of email users claim to have never received one of these emails, which usually purport to be from a West African businessman offering the recipient a share of a massive unclaimed fortune.

Such a statistic confirms that these scams have now become a plague on most users' inboxes.

silicon.com recently covered the phenomenon of the 419 scam, which first originated from within Nigeria and has now spread to Zimbabwe, the Ivory Coast, South Africa and Sierra Leone, and we were inundated with an unprecedented level of reader feedback.

Now silicon.com's sister site ZDNet is to publish the findings of a survey which reveals how users treat these emails.

Of those people polled, only 38 per cent said they had never seen one of these scams, while a massive 42 per cent said they just delete them on arrival. Less than two per cent of recipients report the matter while 0.2 per cent admitted to replying and being ripped off.

Since silicon.com started to publicise this issue we have heard from many readers who now report all instances of these scams to the sender's ISP and to various international law enforcement bodies and we have spoken to the groups who are battling this problem.

To read all our coverage of this issue, including advice on what you should do when you receive such a scam, and what happened when silicon.com replied to one such scammer, click here.

Let us know what you do when you receive these scam email and any other comments you want to make, by emailing editorial@silicon.com