I know I shouldn't be by now, but I'm still amazed at what people come up with.

Donna was looking for a vacation rental for a couple of days and found VRBO/HomeAway's web site. Found a property she liked and inquired about it via the listed instructions. Make a long story short, we receive a four-page email with a rental contract and such, and... ta daaaa... payment instructions: use Western Union, and the "Money in minutes - cash" option.

So she contacted the owner directly and the guy went beyond ballistic... and thanked her profusely. Unfortunately, he was booked for the days we wanted.

Being the curious type, I looked up HomeAway scams, and there's a whole user community on their web site with a number of reports of this same scam. They said what happens is that the scammers contact a legitimate owner via email and place "something" in their computer to intercept emails from VRBO. So the owner, like in our case, never finds out his name and property are being used for a scam.

Another part of it is that owners receive an email supposedly from VRBO, saying they have to update their account and security information. The email says "Click here." Well, if you hover the mouse over "Click here," the go-to address shows up as "homeway..." instead of "homeaway..." Little thing, but hard to catch if you don't look twice.

Same day, the phone rang, and CallerID said no name, no phone number. By now, after the VRBO thing, I was in a punchy mood, so I picked it up anyway. Guy with a very thick accent says he's from Microsoft, and they got a message from my computer saying that it had been infected and they could help me take care of it. I really wanted to --- I SOOOO wanted to --- follow him and see where it went, but decided that my deadline was more important. After I hung up, I realized I could hacve said, gee, that's funny --- I have a Mac. Which I don't.

I got the same call last week. I stayed on the line while my wife called a computer tech. friend of ours. When we put him on the phone the caller got very offended and hung up.