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19th April 2012
I have checked up on "Mrs Fowlers Fourth Grade" web site (see bottom of the page) and there were no changes this Monday. Most interesting though was a message from the Secretary of the West Australian Model Railway Club. He had received a similar message to the one below, was suspicious and did some Googling which picked this piece on the PMFC web site. We exchanged messages and both decided it was an elaborate, although fairly harmless scam, that barely seems worth the trouble!

11th April 2012
I received the following e-mail yesterday:-

"Hello Tony and greetings from New York and Mrs. Fowler's 4th grade class! I hope it's ok that I'm contacting you directly!

My class is currently working on special "Hobbies & Crafts" unit and as part of an assignment, the students had to go home and find an educational website/resource(s) on a topic of their choice, along with a list of related websites to share those resources with (this is where you come in). My job of emailing their list of websites is quite the task as you might imagine...

peterboroughmfc.co.uk is on one of the students' (Ryan B.) lists and his suggestion for you can be seen below: "Mobile Hobbies: R/C Planes" (mobilemarketer.us/rc-planes.html - actual link removed). His suggestion is for you to add this link to your resource/links page so that others may benefit from it and hopefully learn something fun and new! Some sort of extra credit will be given to the students with the most implemented suggestions to reward them for their hard work! "

Thank you for considering playing a role in our project, and please let us know if you post the link so I can share it with Ryan and the class! Have a great week!
Mrs. Nancy Fowler (and Ryan Byrk)
Tawasentha Hall, Room 218
"By learning you will teach; by teaching you will understand."

I was curious about this and did some checking, there is a Tawasentha Park in the town of Guilderland, NY but I couldn't find a mention of the school. Nancy Fowler and Ryan Byrk (who seems to have a sister Amy) crop up in Google where links have been established to a number of hobby sites - not just aeromodelling. Also have a look at (faculty.etsu.edu/ellis/links.html - actual link removed), where you will see the 4th Grade class is interested in "Energy & Sustainability".

This all seems too elaborate for a standard "link farm" scam, so I will be interested to hear if Nancy Fowler has anything to say when I let her know about the above comments.

12th April 2012

I did receive an immediate answer from Nancy Fowler as follows:-

"Hello Tony,

Thank you for getting back to me and for taking the time to help out with our project!

You would be surprised (or maybe not) at the little number of folks who are willing to help out. I almost feel like my new job has become emailing for my kids so it really feels great when someone puts up the link (the kids get super excited to see their link up).

Thank you again and have a wonderful day,

Mrs. Nancy Fowler Tawasentha Hall, Room 218
"By learning you will teach; by teaching you will understand." "

This reads to me like a "form letter" to cover most eventualities. I then checked up on the e-mail address that Nancy Fowler was using, which led me to (mrsfowler.org - actual link removed). Again, very elaborate for a con, BUT no actual dates. I am curious enough to check in a weeks time to see if anything changes.