Reply that you will write them a check when you see them at work tomorrow and see what they say.
While there are lots of pointers to this not being a Blackberry message, this most certainly is not one of them.
My company is totally Blackberry-mad, but most of us have removed the “Sent from my Blackberry” tagline in our messages because it’s annoying as hell and clutters up the thread. (besides, if it was REALLY REALLY urgent, everyone knows he’d have sent it as a PIN 
)
ETA: I still vote scam, tho.
Oh, I see. I’ve never had a Blackberry of my own.
Someone asking someone they know for money would probably include how much they need- I guess they don’t put an amount in so you’ll send all you have?
You’ve already given them a massage and they still want money? 
Totally a scam. But if I could find the sender I’d consider giving him a link to a spellchecker.
how can this be anything except a scam?
The OP admits she has a vivid imagination–but this is way too unreasonable. A person legitimately begging for help would address you by your first name and tell you why he needs your money, before he offers to pay you back.
Now a question for computer geeks about how this works:
The first email sent was a blank message, from the legitimate known address of a friend. The recipient then responded to it, and the scam started. If a virus sent itself out from the friend’s address book, why not send the scam message at the same time?
How does the virus re-route the response ?
Well damn, my IP identifying service says that’s reserved for IANA, but IANA says it doesn’t recognise it. And none of the other reverse IP services recognise it either.
I think that IP address might refer to some kind of routing internal to the ISP. Is there another header that begins ‘Received from…’?
That IP address is on a network reserved for non-routed, private addresses (10.x.x.x). Basically, it’s an internal network. How about the previous lines? They’ll let us know the path of the message from the sender to you.
tim
ps I vote scam!
No, only “Received: by”
*
First email:*
Received: by 10.142.226.20 with SMTP id y20cs276296wfg;
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:03:22 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.65.241.20 with SMTP id t20mr125564qbr.88.1201140199065;
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:03:19 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.64.253.1 with HTTP; Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:03:19 -0800 (PST)
Second email:
Received: by 10.142.226.20 with SMTP id y20cs277635wfg;
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:46:51 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.64.142.10 with SMTP id p10mr196491qbd.94.1201142810640;
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:46:50 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.64.253.1 with HTTP; Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:46:50 -0800 (PST)
ETA: it might be important to note that the “To:” field is blank in the first email, both in the regular Gmail view and in “show original.” (The second email is addressed to me).
I am curious about how my reply was routed to the scammer. Has my coworker’s gmail account been totally commandeered? Or is the email only pretending to be from him? (i.e. the address field was somehow automatically filled with a person from my gchat list - which he appears on, although we have never chatted.)