Many decades ago, when I was a small child, we listened faithfully to the radio each morning. I wish I could remember more about this – it was so local and so long ago that there isn’t anything on the Internet about it. I could call a few “oldsters,” but they’d think I was crazy.

This program was hosted by someone named Arlen E. Barnard (I think) who used to give advice to kids about school safety, particularly buses. He was called the Three-A Safety Man. Anyway, his sign-off message was always the same: “Always alert, never hurt.”

That’s good advice. I thought I’d seen every scam going until last week.

First it was chain letters. Remember the ones that asked people to send stamps or pennies or something for some poor child who had a terminal illness – and lived in England? Chain letters were very popular when I was young. Get one letter, send out 10 and if you “didn’t break the chain” in a very short time you’d be rich.

Scam artists keep up with technology.

The invention of the fax machine made these scams even easier. All over the country, in nearly every office that had a fax, letters were spewed out, and some of them were from Spain, Nigeria and other exotic locales. We stood around and laughed at their misspelled words, the use of the language, and it truly never occurred to me that anyone could fall for such an obvious scam.

But that’s not true. People do get involved and lose money in these and many other rip-offs. Someone is making a lot of money, you can be sure. Unfortunately, senior citizens are the biggest target and they are often the biggest losers, too, because many fall for these lines.

I was recently the recipient of the latest in scams, and it’s not from Nigeria this time. It was from a soldier in Iraq. (Or so I thought.)

I get a lot of e-mail every day. Some is work related, and some personal. I also work on many genealogy projects and my e-mail is posted in many places on the Internet, to assist people who are researching their roots in this corner of the country.

When I recently saw an e-mail and the sender was Sgt. James Clayton, I opened it up – for all I knew, he could be looking for relatives, but no, he (whoever he was) was looking for my home address and eventually money.

This pitiful begging letter told a story of him and his two buddies who had “found” millions of dollars left behind in Iraq. He slipped in the information that he had terminal cancer and his two buddies had been killed. If I wasn’t such a cynic, I would at this point start feeling very sorry for this young American hero. But this is not the case. As I discovered after I talked with Windham Police Officer Matt Cyr about this, and then went to the Internet, it seems this military scam has been going on for several years, probably immediately after we got involved in Iraq. On the Internet, I saw dozens of letters with other soldiers’ names, with pretty much the same message. “We’ve found millions, we want to share it with you to honor (the Lord, God, our Country) and give us you address and it will be mailed to you.”

Don’t do this. No matter how sad the letter, how genuine it sounds, it’s another scam.

I don’t know about your childhood or how or where you were raised, but here in Maine, most people in my generation got many doses of reality. Along with the cod liver oil, the Father Brown’s medicine and other old-time cures, it was drilled into our heads that whatever you do, there are consequences, that nothing is free and, as the old radio program said, “Always Alert, Never Hurt.”

Don’t fall for this latest scam. It’s disgusting and it’s enough to make you want to “do something,” but whatever you do, do not respond to the innocent-looking e-mail addresses given in the text of the e-mail because, believe me, they look very legitimate. Don’t try to play detective. Report it to the authorities, the local police department.

Remember the old-time advice.