The end is nigh folks. Apparently, you’re only hope is a plane, around €3,500 and getting an unexpected email from Professor Hubert J Farnsworth. Well, that’s what oul’ Hubert would have you believe anyway, as he’s the centerpiece of a scam email so good it’s worthy of a news story.

Check that spam mail, Hubert may have chosen you to ‘continue the survival of the human race’.

Caught by Scam Detectives, it’s best to read the Farnsworth mail in full to appreciate how wonderfully dumb the whole thing is, and yes that is the name of the professor in Futurama. Anyway, here it is…

‘Dear Friend,

How are you? I hope all is well with your family, friends and pets. I hope this urgent mail meets you in a perfect condition. We have no time to waste regarding the information I am about to tell you, it is an urgent and serious matter.

My name is Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, senior data analyst here at the CERN institute based here in Geneva (http://public.web.cern.ch/public/). CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. You may have seen on the news that, in recent days, our Large Hadron Collider machine has been colliding high-speed beams of energy in order to explore new physics and understand how the universe began. CERN have been adamant that this is safe, however I KNOW THE TRUTH.

The truth is that this experiment that CERN are conducting is extremely dangerous, and could cause global disaster. This experiment has a 95% of causing a black hole, thus swallowing a large area of the planet. The scientists do not want you to know this as they know it will cause panic. However, I can help you.

I am arranging for a number of selected people to be evacuated to a safe location on an island in the South Pacific via aeroplane. You have been selected from random to take part in this evacuation, thus continuing the survival of the human race.’

As Scam Detectives notes you’re then asked to email him back with full name, address, contact number, country and any other email addresses “if you are interested”.

Scam Detectives responded to the mail and “quickly received a badly worded email asking for £3,000 (€3,500) for each flight to the island, to be sent by Western Union wire transfer to an ‘evacuation coordinator’ in Mumbai.”

Utterly brilliant and silly at the same time we can only hope there isn’t a space cadet out there dumb enough to go for it. One scam that has also caught out eye is reported on over at The Register, where they pinpoint a spam mail that is targeting those who suffered flight disruption due to the volcanic ash crisis.

Email invites are being sent out for people to apply to a compensation fund “from Frank Adam at the Civil Aviation Authority”. In reality there is no Frank Adam and no fund – the emails are intended to lure victims into an advance fee fraud.

Why can’t all scammers be as loveable as Hubert eh?