Look at this e.mail I received just now:
-------------------------------------------------------Subj: E-gold Departament
Date: 9/29/2002 8:28:09 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: support@e-gold.com
Sent from the Internet (Details)

E-gold details update ...

The administration of payment system E-Gold informs: That you have not correctly entered the personal information on / the companies Please, go on the account in E-Gold and correct the personal data .

Account Number: Store my account number on my computer. (more info...)

Passphrase:
Turing Number:
Enter sequence of numbers displayed in grid directly above. (Audible Turing Number)

Start at the e-gold Home Page

http:\\www.e-gold.com\member.log Yours faithfully, Department E-Gold ----
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I dunno, for me it was the stellar English that kinda gave it away. What do you guys think?

you go girl!!!Cant believe someone is actually wasting time sending this out.

What is the purpose of it?

eln,they steal your info and then steal your money.

It doesn't come across here, but there were actually boxes in the e.mail into which you could enter your personal data, including account number, passphrase, and turing number. It looks exactly like the e-gold website. I think this person means to make people believe that by entering their data in those boxes, they are saving themselves a trip to the website, while they are actually giving all their account info to the thief.

How do they make exact replicas of sites like that?

I don't know, but it's ###### scary, isn't it?? I mean, it looked PRECISELY like the e-gold site.

they do it with paypal too

I never answer emails from paypal or egold

AOL too

That would be TOO easy!
Just steal their graphics, then copy/paste their source code.
You could have a duplicate site up very fast!

yup very easy

You could do it in 10 minutes flat actually.

yeah I got two.. the first one I forwarded it to egold and when they didn't respond to tell me anything about it (cause I figured it was a hoax to get my account number) which would be ha ha on them cause I have no egold. so I called them and they told me that E-gold will never email and ask you for personal information or anything else unless you have emailed them first with a request and they are following up on that request and for me to tell everyone I know that this email being sent out is a hoax to gain access to your account.. Some newbies wouldn't know any better than to do it.. Cause when you look at it, it seems legitite..

I got a reply today from e-gold, after I sent them the mail with full headers yesterday. They answered that they are looking into it now.

I don't know how these people can sleep at night, knowing they stole some poor persons money.

here's the email response I got from e-gold..

Hate such people, why don't they let us have our money for our selves, they know that most users of such systems is aware of scams anyway.
What about scamboycott.com?