"I've Been Hired to Kill You! I'll Let You Live If You Pay Up!"

I'm certain that each and everybody in the online community has received at one point an email from the grieving widow of some general from an African country that only needed some bank information to be able to transfer the huge sum of money left to her but couldn't collect. It usually says that for the services of providing a bank account the pay is somewhere between $1 and $3.5 million.

The latest scheme discovered by the Fairfax and Stafford county authorities is a bit more drastic than the plea from the widow mentioned above. Extortion is the right word for it. The reports mention receiving an email from a person claiming to have been hired to do the recipients in, but is actually sympathetic to life and doesn't believe the victims to be guilty of what they are charged with.

For a sum of money, the hit man would be willing to let them live and even supply evidence incriminating his contractor. "The sender tells the receiver, 'I've been hired to kill you, it's one of your friends, I'm watching you. However . . . I don't believe you did what they said, and I'm going to give you a chance to pay me, and I won't kill you'," Fairfax police spokeswoman, Camille Neville, said.

The content of the messages received so far differ from person to person, as does the amount of money asked for. The Washington Post reports the case of Manassas resident Jessica Walker, who received an email saying that, in exchange for $15,000, she would get the audiotapes containing conversations between the hit man and the person who wanted to see her dead. Often, the messages contain spelling and grammar errors, as Bill Kennedy, a Stafford County sheriff's office spokesman, told the Post.

The death threat and extortion messages have increased in number since December 2006, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center.