SophosLabs informs us about the latest email scam that knocks at your computer’s Internet port.

The people behind email scams prove to have an out of the ordinary imagination for each new scam they throw on the Internet. The old “give money for a poor child” have long passed, making room for the more advanced and more manipulating techniques present in today’s email scams.

The latest scenario, which can be easily adapted for an action movie, attempts to lure unsuspecting lovers of conspiracy theories into handing over cash and confidential information to internet scammers. The email claims to come from a dying KGB agent offering to pass on secrets of the John F Kennedy assassination.

The email’s author, allegedly suffering from a terminal disease, claims to have access to declassified CIA documents, files from the former KGB, and interviews with key people that have never before been made public. In the email, which has been spammed out across the internet, he tells people that his information could help the recipient become famous: “You can talk about it with your friends and neighbors. You can write your own shocking book that will have success and bring you fame. You can call in to radio talk shows. You can raise the issues. You can demand answers - not in 50 years or 100 years, but right now, in our lifetime.”

“There is a conspiracy at work here, but it’s not about whether someone was lurking on a grassy knoll in Dallas on 22 November 1963,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. “Internet criminals are conspiring to steal sensitive information and raid the bank accounts of unsuspecting internet users. If everyone showed the same skepticism to unsolicited emails as some do to the official investigations into the Kennedy assassination, then maybe less people would end up the victims of a scam.”

The “KGB scam” is a variant of many existing 419 email scams. These scams, also called Nigerian letters, are named after the section of the Nigerian criminal code that they violate. 419 scams were originally sent by fax machine and typically claimed to come from a person needing to transfer large sums of money out of the country.