Watch out: Another round of fake financial institution e-mails is making the rounds.

The newest one uses a real financial institution's e-mail address, but the message is a fraud designed to take your money.

In one version, the message notes, "We detected irregular activity on your (bank/financial institution) check card. For your protection, you must verify this activity before you can continue using your card."

Here's the twist - you don't respond by clicking a link or doing something online. You're asked to "call us immediately at (800) 491-2507. We will review the activity on your account with you and after verification, we will remove any restrictions placed on your account."

And there's the scam - if you call, you'll be asked for personal information that will allow your identity to be stolen or your financial accounts to be raided.

Never, never respond to these messages.

Your financial institution will never contact you via e-mail and out of the blue on sensitive matters involving your account information.

Don't fall for these scams.

By the way, if you ever get an e-mail or a phone call from a questionable source, you can check out the phone number online and see if other people have received calls from the same number and, if so, what pitches were associated with the number.

The easiest way is to go to a search engine like Google (www.google.com) and type in the phone number in the search box. In the case of the e-mail mentioned above, you'd type in "800 491-2507."

The first four or so results will provide links to sites where consumers have posted comments about that specific phone number.

In this case, you'll find dozens of comments from people who received calls from the 800 number above and what the callers were trying to sell or trying to learn.

For your convenience, below are the home pages of some of the phone number sites. Simply type the phone number (including area code) into the search box to see if other people are having issues with the number and caller:

800 Notes

www.800notes.com

Phone Spam Filter

www.phonespamfilter.com

Phone Owner Info

www.phoneowner.info

The Dust Bowl online

I recently watched a History Channel special on "The Dust Bowl," the roughly 10-year period starting in the 1930s when tons of precious topsoil blew away from Midwest farmlands in towering clouds of dirt and dust.

Wheat fields were turned into deserts, and homes were buried in sand dunes.

The photos and brief film clips from the era are powerful images even today.

What struck me most was the extent of the storms: Topsoil from Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico and South Dakota fell in Chicago, New York and eventually the Atlantic Ocean.

Below are some of the best Web sites to learn more about this environmental disaster, its root causes and why it can happen again:

The Dust Bowl

www.usd.edu/anth/epa/dust.html

Farming In The 1930s

www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/water_02.html

Dust Bowl Photos

www.weru.ksu.edu/new_weru/multimedia/dustbowl/dustbowlpics.html

Dust Bowl Multimedia

memory.loc.gov/

Note: In the search box, type "dust bowl" in quotes to get links to photos, audio, video and more.

The Plow That Broke The Plains

http://serc.carleton.edu/resources/23269.html

A short U.S. government film on the ag boom and bust in the Plains States, from the turn of the century to the Dust Bowl era.

The Dust Bowl

www.humanities-interactive.org/texas/dustbowl/

Surviving The Dust Bowl

www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/

1930s Dust Bowl

www.ccccok.org/museum/dustbowl.html

Dust Bowl Lore

http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/D/DU012.html

Migrant Farm Families

www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/lange/index.html

Dorothea Lange photos of people forced from their homes by the Dust Bowl and working in other states as migrant farm families.

(Keith Darnay is the webmaster and designer for bismarcktribune.com. His Web site, featuring this column going back to 1995, is at www.darnay.com.iec.)