My week of e-mail scams

Luciano Pavarotti loved me like a son.

He never wrote, he never called. In fact, we never met.

But in his will the great tenor left me $31.5 million, and I have the e-mail to prove it.

I have as much chance collecting as I do hitting the high C that made him famous.

The e-mail was a recent example of a mainstay of online life -- the scam.

Warnings about these schemes, which typically promise riches but instead try to fleece the recipient, have come ad nauseam from law enforcement, government agencies and security experts all over the world.

Still the scams keep coming. Some are slick, with sophisticated graphics. Others are so crude that they were perhaps created in a dirt-floor Internet cafe shared with donkeys somewhere.

All promise a better life. And you respond to them at your peril.

To sample the latest, staffers in the Business section collected them for one workweek. Luckily, because The Times' spam filter is leaky, hundreds came through, giving us a glimpse into the current international panoply of online scams.

In flowed the unexpected inheritances, risk-free investments, lottery winnings, job offers, tax refunds, bank mistakes in our favor, unsolicited grants and much more. I answered several -- or spoke to people who did -- to get a firsthand view of how the schemes worked. For a taste of each day's bounty, turn to Page C4.

-- David Colker

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Monday

The London representative of the Pavarotti estate prepared me for the shocking news that I was an heir.

"This may sound strange and unbelievable to you," he wrote.

But it didn't sound so strange to Brian David Delany, a singer and actor in New York who got the same e-mail in January.

In 1986, Delany was a sales clerk at a Sam Goody record shop when Pavarotti visited for an autograph session.

"He was wonderful to me," said Delany, who was assigned to assist the opera great. "He said for me to keep on practicing my vocals."

When the e-mail came, Delany, who goes by the stage name Ian Starr, thought his idol had remembered him. For the next several weeks he exchanged e-mails with the "estate," which instructed him to wire nearly $800 for "transfer" fees.

Luckily before he did, Delany's brother warned him it was a scam.

But perhaps it provided creative stimulus. One of Delany's latest songs, a self-recorded effort, is called "Illusion."

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Tuesday

It was our lucky day.