Don't Fall for It: Trust Your Instinct and Delete That E-Mail!

I have always been of the opinion that people who fall victim to Internet scams are a few baud short of a broadband connection. I mean, really. How thick do you have to be to be suckered in? An exiled African king left you an inheritance? A Hong Kong millionaire needs your help getting his money out of a Cayman Islands bank account? A South African lottery has named you the winner? Outlandish.

And then I almost fell for one. I say "almost," but that's a bit of an exaggeration. What I mean is that an e-mail recently penetrated my first layer of defense, that initial skepticism that usually has me deleting suspect messages without even reading them.

The subject line of this one was: "Greetings from HM Revenue & Customs."

I reached for the delete button, ready to dispatch it to the trash. But then I hesitated. Hadn't I lived in England recently? Hadn't I had dealings with Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs agency, Britain's equivalent of the IRS?

I clicked on it.

After some boilerplate about the confidentiality of the message, the e-mail -- from a "tax credit officer" named "Neil Robinson" got to the point: "I am sending this email to announce: After the last annual calculation of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of 344.79 GBP."

I think it was the modestness of that amount -- about $600 -- that tugged at me. I wasn't an instant millionaire. And my sojourn in England had been full of nickel and diming from various official quarters: 300 bucks for a television license, a hefty monthly "council fee." Maybe I was due some back.

The e-mail said that all I had to was fill out the attached form, return it and I could expect my refund. And to simplify matters, Her Majesty's tax men could deposit it directly into my credit card account. All they needed was my credit card number, expiration date, security code and password.

Obviously it was a phishing scam, a ruse to my sensitive information.

"This is one we've seen," a spokesperson for the real HMRC told me when I called London. "We are wise to it." She asked me to forward the bogus e-mail -- and a second one I received a month later -- to phishing@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk.

"We only ever contact customers who are due a refund in writing by post," the spokesperson said. "We never use e-mails, telephone calls or external companies in these circumstances."

Once again, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Your Name in Lights

The AFI Silver is the nicest movie house in the Washington area. Built in 1938, its main theater is a throwback to the glory days of cinema. And because the AFI Silver shows artier or more obscure fare, it usually attracts a crowd that would rather pay attention to the movie, not chatter to each other or text on their phones.

I've always loved the marquee above the renovated theater's box office. The glowing yellow lights would zip around announcing that day's fare. I was saddened when the marquee started to dim. It was only about five years old, but bits of it were going dark.

Last week, I noticed a new marquee. I'm not sure what I think of it. Gone are the yellow lights that reminded me of the 1930s. In their place are colored LEDs that seem a bit-- dare I say it? -- tacky. I got vertigo watching the busy logo for "500 Days of Summer" crawl across the sign.

I asked Ray Barry, director of the AFI Silver, what was up.

"Frankly, we're still sort of experimenting with it," he said. "We don't have the look and feel right in my opinion."

Ray said the old sign turned out to be a nightmare. "We spent over a year in repair efforts," he said. The nadir was when a crew brought in from Florida spent the day atop ladders in the January cold, replacing panels.

"The truth of the matter is that the prior sign was not historic in any way or form, either," Ray said. "That type of device really dates to the '80s, not the '30s."

Ray's right. When I looked at old photos of the Silver, the marquee sported those plastic letters of the sort gas stations use to announce prices.

Speaking of lights: The nearby Discovery headquarters seemed a bit dark to me the other night; the handsome colored lights that face Georgia Avenue were dim. I thought maybe the cable giant had pulled the plug. No, said Discovery's Michelle Russo. Last year the building got what's called LEED Platinum certification, a mark of its greenness. Now the lights are on only between 9 p.m. and 1 a.m.

My e-mail: kellyj@washpost.com