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Always be skeptical and try to answer those doubts. There is no better way to save yourself from being scammed. With that in mind, read on to see some of the scams that I have personally witnessed or fallen victim to.

Perhaps the most notorious internet scam is the Nigerian e-mail chain letter. You get an e-mail from someone overseas who has a lot of money and needs your help to move it.

Lucky you! If you wire him a small fee or give him your bank account information, he'll send you all the money and you get to keep some of it. The only problem is that he either keeps your fee and is never heard from again, or uses your bank account information to steal your money and your identity.

There are many forms of this e-mail scam, including winning a multi-million dollar lottery, being contacted by an African government official, and hearing from an attorney that a long-lost overseas relative left you tons of money in his will. They all share in common that you are supposed to send money or sensitive information to someone sight unseen in order to reap a great reward. Don't do it. Ever. The first rule in protecting yourself from being scammed is that if it's too good to be true, it's not true. So when someone offers you free money that you never asked for, ignore him!

Another common scam is phishing. People send you an e-mail posing as someone important (bank representative, credit card customer service, etc) and tell you that they need your information to process some request. You follow a link to a website that looks just like your banks, plug in the information, and it gets sent to the phisher's database.

I almost fell for an eBay phishing scam. I got a notification that my account was overdue, so I followed the link and entered my login information. However, when it started asking me for my bank account information and debit pin number, I knew something was fishy. That should be your first clue. Financial institutions repeat again and again that they will never ask for your information in this kind of way, so never give it out! Someone asking for it is definitely a fraud. Also, when you follow a link that should take you to a website, look at the URL. When the page loads, your browser will contain the current page's URL in the address bar. If that URL is something other than the institution in question (Wachovia.com, or ebay.com), then it is a scam.

As a consequence to that phishing attempt (where the phisher did get my old eBay account

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