READERS, I may not be doing this job much longer.

It's not that I'm tired of it. It's just that an amazing money-making opportunity has come my way.

I received a letter the other day from a man called David Rhodes of Norfolk, who says he can personally guarantee that I can make at least £43,000 within 60 days.

It's worked for Mr Rhodes, apparently. He says he's made £582,710 since 2001 and is on course to become a millionaire.

All I have to do, it seems, is send a £10 note to a person mentioned in the letter and then follow some instructions which involve doing a lot of photocopying and sending out 200 letters of my own.

In the unlikely event that this plan doesn't work out for me, there are a number of other people who want to give me lots of money. They regularly send me e-mails, explaining how the government of Nigeria is giving away cash, and promising they will convey a large chunk of it to me if I will only allow them temporary use of my bank account.

And if these opportunities should fall through, I can always turn to one of the mailings I receive from people telling me I have, without any doubt at all, won a fantastic prize, and all I have to do is call a £1.50-per-minute phone line to claim it.

Seriously, it seems there is never any shortage of people who subscribe to the WC Fields maxim that you should never give a sucker an even break. It's easy to conclude that the people who are rooked by such operations must be stupid, but that would probably be unfair.

In a recent news report about people who sent thousands of pounds to con artists who told them they'd won the Canadian national lottery, I was struck by the fact that very few of the victims sounded like mugs.

If I haven't been fleeced yet, maybe it's because I haven't come up against the scam that was ideally suited to me. And anyway, who's to say I haven't been taken for a ride without realising it? I might well have paid people to do work on my house which they didn't do properly. And didn't someone convince me that digital TV was value for money?

We journalists are often told- especially in the days since the Hutton report - that we shouldn't be so cynical. (Of course, it's easy to call people cynics if they won't swallow what you're telling them.) Well, being cynical and suspicious may be a bad thing when it comes to personal relations, but when money is involved, it's the only way to behave.