The name's Francis, Hollace William Francis. And if you think you're being scammed Agent Francis of the Anti-Scam Department Team of the British Secret Intelligence Service (britishsecretservice-uk.org) wants to hear from you by fax or secured email. And Agent Francis is just waiting to use his advanced scam combat techniques (and, no doubt, his moving eagle eyes and realistic gripping hands) on your behalf.

Defrauded? Conned? According to Agent Francis:

... there is super good news, as you can receive immediate and a complete free of charge assistance from our department, where we can assist you in tracking down these con artists, have them brought to justice, and retrieve any monies in complete amounts that you have been scammed out of, in a maximum of twenty four (24) hours only, by using our new advanced scam combat techniques.

Well, isn't that a relief? In only 24 hours — Bond himself could hardly do it better.

Unfortunately, it looks as if budgetary cutbacks have hit Her Majesty's Secret Service hard. For one thing, they're reduced to sending out their messages to possible scam victims as botnet-transmitted spam. And the domain britishsecretservice-uk.org (which redirects to the real MI5 website) appears to be registered to someone who claims to be in the US ... and hosted by Microsoft? And anyway, what's the SIS doing using a '.org' domain. Something smells phishy here.

Call me paranoid, call me overly suspicious, but I don't think this is real. I think that the email I just received from Agent Hollace William Francis (Hollace? Who the hell is called Hollace?) might just be ... gasp ... a fake!

Shend in the nexsht shucker, Mish Moneypenny.