It has come to my attention that a bot recently sent this e-mail to many (if not all) of our members, entitled "PLEASE I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE. ( From Omnimaga: The Coders of Tomorrow )":

"> philipculu has sent you this email from http://omnimaga.org/index.php.
>
>
> PLEASE I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE.
> Abidjan-Cote D'Ivoire
> West Africa
> Email:   [email protected]
>
>
>  Dear
>
> CONFIDENTIAL.
>
>  I am PHILIP CULUBARA,Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you. I know this mail may come to you as a surprise, since we have not known or written before.
>
> My Mother died long ago when she was about to deliver a baby, based that i lost our mother so early my father took me so special, i am  only one from my mother's side.
>
> Introducing my self , I am philip 19 years of age the only son of the late Chief and Mrs Desmond Culubara, My father was a gold and cocoa merchant based in Ghana an abidjan ( Ivory Coast ) He was poisoned to death by his business associates on one of their business trips.
>
>  Before the death of my father on  in a private hospital here in Abidjan. He secretly called me on his bedside and told me that he has a sum of USD$10.M ( Ten Million America Dollar), deposited in a Bank in Abidjan Cote D' Ivoire, that he used my name as his beloved son for the next of kin in depositing the fund. He also explained to me that it was because of this wealth that he was poisoned by his business associates, that I should seek for a foreign partner in a country of my choice where I will transfer this money and use it for investment purpose such as expansion of his existing cocoa business and real estate management overseas. I have make an arrangement with the  bank manager here on how best to transfer this money to overseas please, I am humbly seeeking your assistance in the following ways.
>
> 1- To assist me in providing an account of yours where this fund can quietly be transferred into.
>
>  2-To serve as the guardian of this fund since I am still in the secoundary school.
>
>  3)- To make arrangement for me to come over to your country to futher my education and to help me secure a residential permit in your country.
>
> Moreover, I am willing to offer you 10% of the total sum as compensation for your effort/ Input after the successful transfer of this fund into your nominated account overseas, while 5% will be set aside to offset any expenses we may incure.
>
>  Furthermore, you can indicate your option towards assisting me as I believe that this transaction would be concluded within the shortest possible time if you signify interest to assist me.
>
> Please i will like you to reply your message to my private Email address: [email protected]
>
> Thanks and God bless.
>  Yours sincerely
>
>  PHILIP CULUBARA
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> Please note that Omnimaga: The Coders of Tomorrow has no control over the
> contents of this message.
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
>
> Regards,
>
> The Omnimaga: The Coders of Tomorrow team.
> http://omnimaga.org/index.php
>
>"

If you got this e-mail do NOT respond to it, as it is a scam and you could be ripped off. We have got spambots problems on the forums a while ago, but now it seems the bots now send e-mails to members instead of posting on the actual board, so I've taken control of the solution by deleting that member account, banning his IP and disabling the e-mail system for the entire member user group, in which new members are registered by default, later I will add a clone of this usergroup so when new members reach 6 posts, they are sent to that new group, thus, allowing them to send e-mails to other members again. It will be a long while before i do this though as I'll have to move all current members manually to that new group as some alerady reached 6 posts.

We apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused and we will make sure this won't happen again in the future, even if we have to disable registrations completly for a while.

Just so you know there is no way for the bots to get your e-mail address, as the e-mail form only allowed you to post a title and text, and the e-mail link in the member profile didnt showed the e-mail address.

Cure777, the spam bot does not actually know your e-mail address as it sent you the email through the forums.

I received this yesterday morning too, funny stuff. I thought they stopped these Nigerian Prince type of scams a long time ago though, I remember getting these back in 2002.

Even if it is kind of funny to me, it is also annoying. Thank you for your measures against it Kevin. Do you think there's any more things that could be done against it, like enable both letter-code validation and e-mail validation for members who want to register?

- Alex

xlibman, if you want some help on moving users around, I can help you out with that.

Nobody cares about this poor helpless boy!  

aww poor kid. I will send him a cookie.
[/sarcasm]
stupid bots.

*xlibman

it supports mail verification but not captcha, but both of those doesnt work anyway, because MaxCoderz, Revsoft and Cemetech had both enabled, and bots could still get in. They have been programmed to be able to automatically validate their accounts and read that pic code.

aww...I didn't get one...otherwise I would have ofered to decapitate him with a rusted hacksaw