No, of course not. This is an article about online scams and how to avoid them. You already found your way to our site with minimal difficulty, which means you’re smart enough not to fall victim to a scammer in the first place, but maybe you can print this out and mail it to your grandmother before she wires money to a sweet-talking man on the other side of the globe. This is part of our Lazy Friday series, in which we link to an old Investopedia article of ours, and update it if warranted. This one didn’t warrant it.

Here’s the attention-getting introductory paragraph, the maximum that our agreement with Investopedia allows us to reproduce here:

You may already be a winner. But, not if you go through your spam folder, responding to everyone who offers you money. Fraud is one of the most dynamic online “industries,” continuously changing to keep pace with an ever-more-skeptical population. According to a report from the National Consumers League, in the late 1990s, when the internet was still in its nascence, the most common way to steal money online was to sell services and never deliver them. Today’s scammers are more indirect, if just as diabolical.

Great stuff, no? Click here for the original.