scam request money for reason lost?

100% scam.

There is no one in Spain, no one lost their wallet, no one contacted the embassy, nothing legit in that email.

There is only a scammer trying to steal your hard-earned money.

The next email will be from another of the scammer's fake names and free email addresses and will demand you pay for made-up fees, in cash, and only by Western Union or moneygram.

Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.

Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of great jobs, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram.

Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash.

Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.

If you google "fake travel scam", "fraud Western Union vacation holiday scam" or something similar you will find hundreds of posts from victims and near-victims of this type of scam.

These are very common scam emails.

I found that..

Usually "your friend in need" is one who FWD FWD's a lot of junk mail and doesnt protect his address at all.

Eventually these email addresses end up in the wrong hands

This is so fake. He isnt in Spain

Your friend needs to change his password or close this account. He isnt in Spain . His address has been hijacked.

If you know his phone number.. call him.

This is a scam - just mark it as spam and delete it. The Embassy always helps out people in trouble

What does it matter where it came from? Any e-mail that is asking you for money is A FRAUD.

Scam, do not assist this person, they will steal from you.