I received this mail "from" a contact's web mail account.. well, I say "from", it was actually a dial-up account in Nigeria (41.155.100.234 in this case).

Subject:  HELP!!!

Hello,

      I'm sending this short email with panic in my heart, the situation of things here right now seems so tensed and frighting because I'm  stranded here, apparently l was stuck here in LONDON ENGLAND with family because we were held by muggers on KENTISH TOWN ROAD  yesterday after shopping at the city mall, our wallets were taken from us which has our credit cards and bank cards in it, but we already canceled  them now, our passports were taken as well but the embassy are working on it trying to fix a way to get us an ID that will be valid for us to get  on flight back home but seems like it will take couple of days or three but right now i need a quick loan from you which is very urgent,  so we can use for our upkeep for the next 3days, l promise to pay you back, as soon as i'm back home, l give you my word on that, please email  me as soon as you get this to confirm and let me know if you can be of help.

God bless you. 

What has happened here is that the victim recently received a message from their webmail provider that said that their account might be shut down because of a lack of capacity.. and please could you confirm that it was still in use by sending back the login details. THAT gave the scammers the username and password, and then they raided the contacts to send this plea.

So.. if you receive a mail message like this, then it's a scam.. but don't ignore it, the best thing to do is tell your contact that their mail account has been compromised and that they need to change their password (if they can) and also review any banking or financially sensitive emails that they store, because it is possible that the scammers could have compromised those as well.