Some of you are new to e-mail lists and have a trusting heart. Sometimes you get burned. I know because you write unhappy letters about it to me.

The picture con may be the most popular shell game tricksters will play on you.

You're a newbie and post an intro with your stats and maybe a pik. Some guy writes and says how appealing you are and asks for more pix. You exchange a few e-mails. He keeps begging for more. You have a few intimate pix, but are afraid to send them because they might wind up on the Internet, and with you in the closet, that would be BAD. So since he is trusting enough to send you his snail- mail address, you send him a few intimate pix by snail instead of by e-mail. (That he gives you his snail-mail address offers no guarantee. Many use an address that disguises the fact it is not a house or apartment, but a postal box.)

You wait expectantly. His last letter was signed "love," and, boy, did that turn you on. He seems like an answer to all your prayers, from what he tells you of himself. Of course, he has sent you no picture of himself, and now he has a dozen of you.

You never hear from him again. You write. No answer. You write again. Still no answer. Then you write to me. "Ben, do you know this guy? Does he do this to other people?"

No, I don't know him, but I look him up, and he is on the list. I resolve to keep an eye out for his name in future. I may get letters from other guys and find out he's doing the same to them. At that point, I can advise him to move on.

What do I do about it till then? I write this posting. What do you do about it? Remember the lesson you have learned, and go on your way a little wiser. I am not Lord Protector of the heart you have given him. You are. You have been the victim of the "pix con," a classic Internet behavioral pattern indulged in by some silverfoxes and some foxhunters alike.

They want pud-whacker pix anyway they can get them, no matter how many fantasy-inducing pix they can find on the Internet. Some people accumulate pix as others do stamps or coins. In my view, there is nothing wrong with that. For others, it is a sport, as in collecting trophies, although if they don't even know you, that strikes me as somewhat perverse. It may constitute an addiction. Well, would that all addictions were so harmless and so mild!

What is sad here is when they employ the means of playing on your heart strings to get the pix, when they promise you love, get the pix, and then disappear. That makes it a con.

So now it's up to you to be more careful in giving of yourself and your pix the next time.

Most of the men on these lists don't behave that way. But some do. Your job is to take it all with a grain of salt and keep looking for the real thing. My job is to alert you to the fact that just because a guy subscribes to an e-mail list and stakes a claim on intergenerational love does not mean everything he says is true.

Some will call me cynical, or worse. What I am is pragmatic, based on what I have read and know after infinite bandwidths of e-mail to me have poured out the misery in broken hearts.