Scam warning

A new scam attempt is going around in which an e-mail offers $25,000 up-front for a sponsorship to play 5/10 and higher on a new poker site.

Here's the e-mail:

Dear smizmiatch,

This is Larry Fry and i am the administrator of www.Alley-Poker.com. After a review of your player nickname "smizmiatch" in various poker sites, we decide that your eligible for a sponsorship deal here at www.Alley-Poker.com

As you may already know, Alley Poker is a new poker room established in 2008. We have an average of 2.500 players online during the day, and about 4.500 during the night. We are trying to get more players to our card room by offering this kind of deals to the poker professionals.

What you get with my sponsorship offer:

* Your Alley Poker account will be credited with $25,000 and an extra $5,000 per month.

* One Hundred "100%" percent of the profits you generate while playing on our site will be yours.

* The first contract will be valid for 6 months.

Requirements:

* You will need to play at least 2 times per week and a minimum of 400 hands "1600 hands per month".

* Your allowed to play only the following stakes 5/10 , 10/20 , 25/50 Heads up games.

To accept this sponsorship deal please follow the instructions below:

1) Visit http://www.Alley-Poker.com
2) Download the poker client and register an account under the username "smizmiatch".
4) After your registration is complete please reply back to admin@Alley-Poker.com so i can setup the contract and credit your account.

We will be glad to have you as a player in our poker room. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me at admin@Alley-Poker.com

Sincerely,
Larry Fry
Administrator - www.Alley-Poker.com

I didn't see the angle at first.

But then I read this 2+2 thread about the scam and realized "Alley-poker" was trying to install a keylogger on my computer. That wouldn't be good.

A great security program to guard against keyloggers is SnoopFree. Unfortunately, I haven't found a similar free program that works on Vista.

I felt a little foolish for thinking for a few minutes that this offer might be legit.

In general, if something is too good to be true, it probably is. On the other hand, the entire concept of making money playing Internet poker also seems too good to be true, but it's been profitable for me since 2004.