Repeat after me: If it sounds too good to be true, it is.

You are now inoculated against e-mail scams, whether Nigerian money transfers, Mexican lotteries or Bulgarian currency fluctuations.

But, sadly, some of you will not heed this advice. You will receive an unsolicited e-mail couched in such moving terms, so convincingly written, you’ll figure it just can’t be fake this time, too.

Off will go your &#8220processing fee,” or your &#8220start-up costs,” and into the ether they’ll disappear. No Internet genie will deposit six figures in your account.

Many of these scam e-mails ask people to do things – like send money to people they don’t know – none of us would fall for if someone walked up and asked the same, or sought over the phone. But especially for computer novices, the Internet still has a faint sheen of magic. Maybe, just maybe, there really is someone out there in cyberspace who wants to give us money for nothing.

Yeah, sure.

Perhaps months later you’ll call the local police and file a report. But odds are, nothing will come of it; you’ll never see your money again, because Internet scammers are notoriously hard to catch, especially when operating internationally.

In this case, it’s up to you to police your own e-mail. The only sure way to avoid being taken is to not be fooled in the first place.

Of course, most people are sufficiently suspicious to not accept these pleas at face value. But the tactic survives on volume. For someone with the time and right equipment, sending a million e-mails is as easy as sending one. Even if only one person in a thousand sends in the $79.95 &#8220fee,” that’s still a sum well worth the spammer’s while.

What’s important to look for is the pattern: Someone you don’t know is contacting you at random, saying they’ll give you a big return on a small initial investment. They’re in dire circumstances, which make it necessary to shift large amounts of money through U.S. banks – and they just happened to choose your account, out of hundreds of millions. Just send your money to this address, wait and hope, and you’ll get a big surprise.

Then there’s lost-your-account-info scams. They ostensibly come from eBay, your bank, PayPal or a number of other organizations that legitimately would have your credit card number, Social Security number or other very personal information. The pitch goes there’s been a computer glitch at the home office, and your data was lost. Won’t you help us out by typing it in again? You have to, or we’ll shut down your account. Trust us. Truuuuust uuuuuussss ….

And many of these do look convincing. Internet scammers can make graphics just as elaborate as any corporate Web site, and often swipe legitimate logos to dress up their schemes.

But these, too, are fakes.

The legitimate companies agree – they’ll never ask for your personal info through an unsolicited e-mail. If there really has been a massive data loss, they should have sufficient backups to not need your help. And if they do need anything, you will always be able to verify it with the company in question.

Second ironclad rule: When in doubt, check it out.

Call your bank. Go to eBay’s official Web site and e-mail them directly. Search urban-legend sites like snopes.com. Or just go to google.com and type in a few names or complete phrases, enclosed by parentheses, from the suspicious missive, and watch reports of identical frauds pop up.

You’ll be glad you did.