Email scammers tout assets of deposed Arab leaders

Scam emails supposedly from close aides or relatives of deposed Arab leaders are offering a huge chunk of their assets if recipients hand over their bank details or pay a fee up front. "The quantity of attacks of this sort that we detect is enormous," said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at Sophos, which uses sophisticated spam filters to identify scam emails. In one email, a scammer pretends to be the wife of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. She says she has managed to escape to Tunisia and is desperately looking for a "reliable partner" to transfer $25 million of Gaddafi’s funds.