Linda Gardner woke up Wednesday morning to a mess.

After her e-mail account was hacked and every one of her contacts received a desperate plea for money so she could leave the United Kingdom, Gardner spent much of the day picking up the pieces and trying to get the word out to friends, business associates and hundreds of other e-mail contacts that she was all right.

“I’m not in England,” the Bend resident said Wednesday, laughing.

The e-mail, written in more fluent English than most common e-mail scams, said Gardner had lost her wallet while in the U.K. and her hotel would not release her passport, valuables and luggage until she paid for her room. The e-mail asked for the equivalent of about $2,400 to help pay the hotel bill so she could return home.

Using a business e-mail account, Gardner was able to contact many of the people who had received the fraudulent request from her Yahoo! account.

“So far I’ve just been putting out the fires,” she said.

Gardner, who works as a real estate broker and says she also does a lot of nonprofit work, has a large number of e-mail contacts.

“I have a huge e-mail address list,” she said. “I have sorority sisters from college, friends and clients around town. I belong to several women’s organizations. … Just a lot of things like that. There are easily a thousand names in there.”

Luckily, Gardner said, most people who contacted her thought the e-mail sounded a bit fishy.

“I haven’t been to England in 50 years, so people who know me probably would wonder why the heck I was in England in the first place,” she said. “The phraseology was a little more British-sounding than my particular version of English. So a lot of people e-mailed me and said, ‘This doesn’t sound like you. Is it a scam?’”

It is indeed, said Althea Rodgers, a consumer educator for the Oregon Department of Justice.

“I’ve heard about this run in several ways,” Rodgers said, noting the scam likely originates in the African country of Nigeria. “They do it a couple different ways. They either guess your password correctly or there’s (malicious software) embedded in a lot of those fake phishing e-mails, and when you click on the link the (software) has been downloaded onto your computer, giving them access to your e-mail.”

Rodgers has also seen the scam perpetrated through social networking Web sites like Facebook.

Gardner is not alone. She said her next-door neighbor was also recently victimized by an e-mail hacker. Both received e-mails from what appeared to be the e-mail provider — in Gardner’s case, Yahoo! — stating she needed to answer a questionnaire with her e-mail address and password to ensure the account was still active.

“(It) looked authentic. Mine looked like the correct Yahoo! address,” Gardner said. “I don’t know if it was just a coincidence or if it’s really something Yahoo! sent.”

Rodgers said it was likely part of the scam.

“That’s a classic way they mask those scam e-mails … it looks like it’s coming from important companies that you work with, your bank or the government,” she said. “They’ll lure people into providing personal information, like ‘I need your password in order to do any work on your account.’”

To avoid falling prey to such scams, Rodgers suggests consumers change their passwords on a regular basis and use passwords that are difficult to guess and include numbers and capitalizations. She also advises not to open e-mails from unfamiliar addresses.

“We’re seeing a lot of it, though,” she said. “I travel around and give consumer talks four days a week, and in the last two weeks I’ve heard about this three times. We also hear about it a lot on our consumer hotline.”

To report a scam

To file a consumer complaint about an e-mail scam, contact the Oregon Attorney General’s consumer hotline.

The hotline is available between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.

Call 1-877-877-9392 , or e-mail consumer.hotline@doj.state.or.us