In a tactic that slightly resembles the so-called hitman spam, where a scammer claims to have been paid to murder the recipient, spammers are sending out messages that pretend they have kidnapped the recipient's child:

Hey We have hijacked your baby but you must pay once to us $50 000. The details we will send later... We has attached photo of your fume.

The text of the message suggests that English is not the sender's first language (in places, the message reads more like Lolcat). Unlike the hitman scam, where the goal was to trick the recipient into sending money to 'pay off' the imaginary assassin, the goal here is to get the user to open the attached file — which, of course, contains a virus, rather than the promised picture.

The real question is, what the hell is a ‘fume’? My best guess is that the spammer is using a dictionary to translate from their own language, and that a word for 'child' in their language is actually a homonym, with two possible translations.

Update: the hitman spammer is back too, with more scam messages being reported recently.