The emails claim that the recipient has been stalked by a hired assassin for 10 days, but that the hitman is prepared to drop the contract if he is paid a total of $80,000. Upon receiving an initial advance payment of $20,000 the hitman claims that he will produce taped evidence of the contract to kill the reader of the email.
Part of the email, which start with a cheery greeting of "Good day" and can have a subject line of "Read this to be safe and a new life in this new year", reads:
"This is surely one of the sickest phishes yet seen — the intention of this email is quite clearly to frighten the recipient into coughing up a substantial amount of money or, at the very least, their bank account details," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "Innocent, vulnerable people could be scared into believing that the contents of the email are truthful, while the not-so-innocent are arguably even more likely to be hoodwinked. It may be hugely unnerving to receive such threats, but the only way to stop the distribution of these messages is for users to stop responding."
I received this email today, it honestly scared me since my husband is a correctional officer. I did not follow the directions, instead I called the FBI and was told not to worry that it was a scam. My husband being in law enforcement just made this email seem even more real to me. 
