Cooking The Books

Each week the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB's Cooking The Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's how scammers will try to get your cash, and what you can do to stop them. Hosted by Frances Cook.Nigeria's royal family must be enormous.It seems that every couple of months, a new Nigerian prince is emailing me his tale of distress; how he's inherited a lot of money and needs a trustworthy person like me to help him access it.All I need to do is pay the fee to unlock the millions, and for my efforts I can get a couple of million myself.Okay, so maybe we all know to avoid that particular scam, but far too many kiwis are still caught out every year by scammers.Just last week, scammers started sending out emails claiming  to be from the IRD, and promising a large tax refund.Clever timing, scammers. It certainly is tax refund time, but you should get yours by going to the real IRD website, not clicking links in unsolicited emails.You'd be surprised at the people who get sucked in by these tricks. Fo