DRH wrote:
> It turns out the job offer I thought I had was a Nigerian scam. If you
> receive a job offer working for
> a large oil company in Nigeria for "obsene amounts of money", beware.

If you receive an unsolicited job offer in e-mail out of the blue, you
can be pretty sure it's a scam, regardless of content :)

Usually, if you have any doubts that it might be legitimate, these are
very easy to check, too: if the e-mail it's from or the e-mail you
should contact is not a company e-mail address you can find associated
with the company (call up the company's website and check the mail
domain used), then it's pretty sure it's a scam.
Real companies never use free "throwaway" e-mail accounts like yahoo,
hotmail, mail.com, or any of the many many others out there.

> I ran the letter by a
> Lawyer, and 4 of my smartest friends they all thought it was real.

Content may be written in a convincing way, that's why you should always
look at the e-mail headers and addressing information. Once again: if
you didn't ask for it and it has no clear link to anything you did to
receive job offers like that, it's a pretty safe bet that you are
looking at a scam. If the offer seems too good to be true, you can bet
that it -is- :)