A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from an old friend with whom I correspond regularly. She said she needed help with something immediately, but her phone wasn't working so she wrote to me. So I responded, and she replied that she needed to send a birthday gift to a niece who was ill, but the bank told her there was a problem with her account, so she asked me to buy $500 worth of Amazon gift cards and send her the numbers on them so she could send them to her niece that day. (OK, I'm sure you see the same red flags I saw.) She didn't seem to me to be the kind of person who sent $500 birthday gifts to a niece I had never heard about, and why was she asking me for help instead of her financially comfortable children? The coincidence of the non-working phone seemed intended solely to keep me from calling, so of course I called, and there was nothing wrong with the phone. My call was her first notice that her email account had been hacked for her contact list. She called me a couple of nights ago, and she is still struggling to regain control of her email account.