Con artists thrive when people are desperate to replace lost incomes or hang onto their homes, the Federal Trade Commission warns.

"The problem is huge. We've had people who walk in our door who have lost their life savings," said Lauren Noether, head of the state's Consumer Protection & Antitrust Bureau.

In 2003, an eight-state study of wire transfers found that 30 percent of those involving more than $300 were fraud-related. Three years later, the Federal Trade Commission reported that internet-related wire transfer fraud complaints tripled between 2003 and 2005 alone. And that was before the economy turned sour. Now, scams have increased and more vulnerable people, including some New Hampshire residents, are falling prey to them. Don't become one of them.

The Monitor regularly reports on the latest scams being investigated by the Consumer Protection Bureau of the attorney general's office. The majority target low-income residents and the elderly, but some are designed to fleece the kind of normally savvy people who trusted their money to Bernard Madoff, the man accused of pulling off the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.

The FTC's website, ftc.gov., lists the most common scams. Some are blatantly illegal, others deceptive. Count among the latter some of the stock investment infomercials now airing on television in New Hampshire and elsewhere. The ads feature average-looking people of formerly average means who have racked up huge gains in the stock market in days or months. "You can get rich quick too. All you have to do is pay a modest fee to learn the system," the ads promise. But if the alleged system guarantees a return, don't buy it, the FTC warns. There are no guarantees in the stock market.

The goal of such offers, including those that promise a free lunch or dinner at an expensive restaurant or hotel or a seminar for a modest fee, is to lure people into paying more and more for information of modest or dubious value. Some states have won settlements from such companies and managed to secure refunds for some customers, but most buyers are out of luck.

Among the most common scams, the FTC says, are work-at-home schemes, credit repair services, vacation prize promotions, secret shopper offers, chain letters, bulk e-mailings, and phony business or investment opportunities. But New Hampshire residents have also been victimized by criminals who claim that one of their relatives has been arrested in Canada or elsewhere and needs bail money, people who pretend to be contract killers who've been offered money to kill the person they called but who won't if money is sent, and scams that involve sending the victim a bad check with instructions to deposit it and send some of the money back via a wire transfer.

As the economy worsens the scams will increase, as will the temptation to believe that the offers are true. The best advice, the experts say, is to suspect the worst and hang onto your money.