Your bank details are your business
You may be aware from recent press stories that several banks have been targeted by e-mail fraudsters - false emails have been sent out to request personal bank details from their customers. Please be aware that  banks and building societies will never request confidential information or security details in an e-mail. If you do receive an e-mail asking for your Barclays Internet Banking or account details, eg. pin numbers, passwords, or you are suspicious in any way, please delete it immediately. Do not call any telephone number or action any request in the e-mail.
If you suspect you may have revealed your details, contact your bank or building society immediately.

Investment scams
There are many poor-value, crazy or even dangerous get rich schemes out there. Here are some to watch out for. There are a million ways to lose money in this world, and the more spare cash you have and the less financial experience the more tempting they appear to be. So-called can’t lose investment schemes, share scams, crackpot property investments, pyramids and complex commodity schemes top the pile. There are also plenty, which probably won’t lose you your money, but will just fail to make it perform.
If there is one trait that really should tip you off, it is the hard sell. If someone is really trying hard to persuade you to go into an investment scheme, and sadly this is just as true if that someone is a friend or acquaintance, then the chances are they have something to gain from your participation. That’s true of free gifts on application, rebates of premiums or free entries to prize draws. Someone is paying for those promotional items, and the chances are that in the end it will be you.

Easy millions? Don’t bet on it
Let’s face it, if someone really has found a foolproof way to make big money quickly, then the chances are they are quietly getting on and doing it, not slogging door to door, cold-calling your telephone, and sending you spam to get you to join in.

Boiler room scams
Boiler room scams are no more than illegal share trading operations. Someone phones you and asks you to invest money in companies you’ve never heard of, and which subsequently turn out either never to have existed, or to be non-tradable. None of us would fall for such an obvious ploy, surely? Don’t believe it. These people are super-persuasive, and the lure of riches can overcome any doubts. A recently infiltrated Thai-based boiler room scam, using plausible and well-educated Britons as salesmen milked £520 million out of gullible investors culled from European and US telephone directories. In most cases there is little chance of ever getting your money back.

Financial chain letters
Beware. The e-mail usually arrives from someone you know, and therefore gets right around your spam blocking software. The e-mail, which has been repeatedly forwarded, will say you are missing out on some fabulous investment opportunity, details of which will be sent to you in exchange for a payment to the person who sent you the e-mail. You are urged to copy the email on to at least another dozen people, and in turn, you are promised, all those will send you an equivalent payment. There will probably be plenty of testimonials from respectable sounding investors, and even bogus authentication from some official agency like the Inland Revenue. Again, it all sounds so obvious, but many are cleverly persuasive.

Advance fee fraud
This is something that Nigerian gangsters seem to have made their own speciality during the last decade or so. One typical approach is for a letter or fax to be received from a plausible sounding bank official or lawyer abroad, saying that you appear to be the beneficiary of a substantial will from someone who may be a distant relative. Once you have responded, given personal details and started trusting that this is genuine, you will be asked to advance a fee to get the paperwork sorted out, or remove some other bureaucratic blockage. Once you have given some money, more will be demanded. Sometimes this is thousands of pounds, but it is always a fraction of the promised inheritance. Inevitably, the money is never seen again. Some of the larger scams have even involved face-to-face meetings in London hotels, bogus banks with their own professional looking websites, and enough corroboration to fool all but the most suspicious of punters.

You have won a free holiday...
These things seem to drop through the letterbox every day. Sometimes it is just a legal version of an advance fee scam. There are two types. One is a scratchcard which always seems to reveal a winning symbol, and the other is an official looking letter with 'open immediately' emblazoned on it and a certificate visible through the envelope window taking you through to the final round of a 'competition'. Typically, you will be amazed to find that you have definitely won either a luxury sports car, an all-expenses paid holiday to the Far East, a wide-screen TV or - and this is the important part - 200-300 euros of travel vouchers with a reputable travel agent.
Travel vouchers are rarely worth their face value, in that they either offer you discounts off full prices which almost no-one ever pays, or can only be redeemed as a modest discount against a very expensive holiday. For that reason, vouchers seem to be the prize that most people end up getting. In order to claim your prize, you normally have to phone an outrageously expensive premium phone number, and wait to have your claim processed. In most cases the cost of this will exceed the value of the available prize, and on top of all this you added to a particularly valuable 'suckers' mailing list compiled by the scratch card firm. Once they sell it you will be deluged with an even wider variety of junk mail. It is possible to claim your prize by post - but you need marvellous eyes to see the small print telling you this. In most cases it really isn’t worth the cost of a stamp.

Wine
The investment case for wine is simple, but extremely narrow. For 95 per cent of world production, whatever you think of the taste, there is simply no money to be made. Yet for a few reliably fine Bordeaux wines, such as Margaux, Latour Haut Brion and Chateau Lafite there will always be more demand than supply. How to get a part of that value is tricky. Buying en-primeur is one route, making a deposit with a wine merchant as the grapes are harvested and waiting two years for the wine to be made and acquire value. This has grave risks if the crop is poor, or indeed if the wine merchant goes belly up. Buying and keeping already produced wine offers more predictable though often thinner returns. However, it is absolutely vital to know your vintages and regions inside out. Indeed, unless you are already a serious oenophile, the cost in time of getting to the level of knowledge required may well be prohibitive.