How close can they get to you? So close that they can actually talk to you, no matter where in the world they are located? Nigerian 419 scams are not new and have been a nuisance to email users for years. Traditionally, Nigerian scammers have reached out to email users through text-based emails, Word documents, PDF documents, and are increasingly targeteting social networking sites. However, all of these techniques have one thing in common—rubbish stories of a huge money inheritance, kinship, and financial assistance that is communicated via typed messages. Spammers are constantly in search of techniques that will allow them to reach users’ inboxes by beating anti-spam filters. Any deceit used is fair game for them. Recently, we noticed one such technique used by spammers to make their way into users’ inboxes exploiting VoIP (voice over IP) services. The spammers are creating fake accounts on sites providing VoIP services and then, using these fake accounts, they are sending out invites to users by utilizing the “invite friends” functionality. This is a very crafty technique used by spammers in an attempt to break through the anti-spam filters and send the anti-spam community on a wild goose chase. The email message invite sent by spammers through a VOIP account has all of the legitimate content in the message header. Spammers are inserting the same stories of rhetoric (about unclaimed funds or some sort of inheritance) directly into the email message invite, which will hopefully go unnoticed by anti-spam technologies. Here is an example image of this type of message: There is no malicious code associated with these particular email messages. However, we caution users not to fall prey to such tactics and avoid responding to this sort of email. Note: Thanks to Neeraj Joshi for contributed content.