If it looks too good to be true then it probably is!
I have seen the damage that can be done, a Proffessor friend of ours retired with a decent amount in her bank account only to loose most of it to a bank account in Asia, she ended up so broke she had to borrow money off her sister for heating oil!!
She did'nt reccognise a scam, she befriended some one on line and that was that, a working life time of saving gone
Sadly this is very common, and more so than we might realise as it gets little publicity for obvious reasons.
I would recommend anyone who receives an email from an unknown person regarding any sort of transaction to either ignore it, or to Google the email address, name, or a few words from the text as they are often standard cut and pastes. Most of them find their way onto sites such as
Welcome to the 419 Eater or
Welcome to ScamWarners.
Also to check the headers, many of them come from West Africa, mostly Nigeria, which gives about a 99.9% guarantee that they are fraudulent. Here are a couple of easy to use header tracing tools.
Error: There do not appear to be any valid IP addresses in the headers you submitted. Please try again.
Tracing Emails - Mail Parse - Parsing and Tracing Mail Headers - MailParse