I have a short and sweet rule for investing for you today. If you ever hear the words "hot" and "stock" and "tip" together in a whispered sentence. Walk away. You get bonus points if the come-on contains the word "inside".

These don't come my way as frequently as they used to. Probably because those who always seem to have these prime bits of information know I'm never in the market for hot stock tips. When they do, I always just smile, say thank you and walk away.

I'm having some work done here at the house. The guy doing the work for me came as a recommendation from another contractor who'd done work here previously. He, the first contractor, had done a great job so I asked him for a recommendation.

My new guy showed up and surveyed the job. He wrote up a nice proposal delineating all his estimates for material costs and a labor charge. His proposal clearly stated he would charge me only his costs for materials.

This is a big job. It's taken several months' time to complete. Knowing this I figured we'd settle into some kind of "pay as you go" compensation scheme.

That's why I didn't object to his asking for partial payments to cover his costs of material. I also didn't bat an eye when he asked for a payment against his labor as we came into the holidays. He had always shown me his receipts and I felt like we was asking for a fair amount.

At the time of my first payment he showed me his receipts. It all added up. I wrote the check. I was away on a business trip at the second installment. My wife wrote the check, but didn't ask to see receipts. Yesterday he asked me for a check, no receipts were offered.

Wow. I guess my little blog has arrived. OK so it's just the spam bots that have discovered me, but it's a start, right?

All kidding aside, I received the following email this morning through this site's contact form:

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http://www.myinvestmentblog.com/contact.

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Over the weekend I got an email inviting me to participate in a survey. Now, I usually just toss these in the trash bin. This one caught my eye because it both appeared legitimate and it offered me compensation for my time in completing the survey. So I read on.

The email had every appearance as having been sent by my credit card provider. The graphics were very good. The "From:" and "Reply to:" addresses looked right. The URL for the survey even looked on the up and up.

The email told me the survey would take 5 minutes or less and that I would be compensated via a credit to my card account when I completed the survey. I was born at night; but it wasn't last night. I smelled a scam.

You already know I no longer use Windows on my PC. I've made the switch to ubuntu Linux. I felt reasonably secure that whatever lay on the other end of that link was not targeted at my browser or my operating system. Had I been running Windows I would not have taken the risk. I clicked the link.