(CNN) -- When the e-mail arrived the other day, I knew instantly who it was from.





At least I thought I did.





I recognized the e-mail address. It belonged to Kaye Kessler, an old and treasured friend.





When I was a beginning sportswriter, Kessler was the veteran star of the central Ohio paper where we worked. He gave me my first byline, a kindness for which, as I have told him many times, I am forever grateful. He is long retired from daily newspaper work now, living in Colorado, but we write back and forth from time to time.





So I was startled by the first words of his note:





"I'm writing this with tears in my eyes."





He apologized for "this odd request." He said he was in the United Kingdom, on a vacation in London with his family. He said they had been robbed, at gunpoint. Everything had been taken: cash, credit cards, cell phone. He seemed embarrassed to have to be asking:





He wondered if I could lend him some money so he and his family could get back home. He promised to refund it as soon as he was back in the U.S. He wanted me to wire it to him: "Please do get back to me as soon as possible."





And he signed it: "Kaye."





I felt so bad for him. He's no longer a young man, and I was touched that, in a crisis, he would turn to me. I've never wired money to anyone before, but I started making calls to find out how to do it.





Then something started to feel wrong to me.





I looked at his e-mail again. The address was his, all right.





But there were some sloppy phrases in the note: run-on sentences, lowercase words that should have been capitalized, some incorrect grammar. Kessler was always an extremely careful writer; he was a disciple of the Scripps-Howard Newspapers stylebook. He didn't make mistakes like that.





There were other off-key things in the note. He said he was in London with his family; I knew that his wife had passed away 15 years ago. He said that they "came down here on a short vacation"; those of us from central Ohio would speak of going down to Chillicothe, or going down to Washington Court House, or going down to Cincinnati, but we would never say we had gone "down" to London.





Still, I thought, he was out of the country, he was in trouble, he was undoubtedly scared, so why was I being such a stickler? He needed my help.





Speaking of which, the subject line of the e-mail was:





"Help!!!"





Kessler was not a guy who ever overused exclamation points.





I drafted an e-mail back to him, apologizing for the two questions I was going to ask him. But I knew that there weren't many people in the world, other than the two of us, who would know the answers:





1. Who was the makeup editor on the sports desk, with the thick glasses?





2. What was the name of the restaurant next to the paper where we would sometimes eat dinner?





(In case you're interested: Clarence Young, and Paoletti's.)





I was about to send him the e-mail when I decided to do something first. I took some of the phrases from his e-mail to me and ran them through a search engine.





Yep.





They were part of a scam. People around the country had been receiving them; always, the e-mails had been asking for money to be sent.





But how could this be? This was not some e-mail from an address I'd never heard of, saying that a bank in Nigeria had $100 million waiting for me; this was from Kaye Kessler, from his regular e
What did the old friend write? Who did Greene receive the email from? What did it turn out to be? What did the desperate plea turn out to be?
e-mail Kaye Kessler, a scam. scam.
question: What did the old friend write?, answer: e-mail | question: Who did Greene receive the email from?, answer: Kaye Kessler, | question: What did it turn out to be?, answer: a scam. | question: What did the desperate plea turn out to be?, answer: scam.