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If it wasn’t for junk e-mail, Ernany Paschoal would be out of business.

As a computer technician and owner of the East Naples-based business www.we-fix-pc.com, Paschoal makes a living cleaning viruses from his clients’ computers, many of which were infected after someone clicked on a link in a junk e-mail.

But despite the expertise earned through 20 years of building and fixing computers, junk e-mail still fills Paschoal’s Inbox on a daily basis, much of it containing frauds, scams and other schemes meant to cheat honest people out of their hard-earned cash.

“Probably between all of my e-mail accounts ... I have over 100 a day,” Paschoal said. “Many of them are filtered out to spam boxes, but I do still get quite a few.”

In an effort to both crack down on e-mail scams and bring them to the attention of the public, in mid-December the Collier County Sheriff’s Office’s Economic Crimes Unit launched a new e-mail address, fraud@colliersheriff.net, where residents can send suspicious e-mails they receive.

Investigators will check the account daily and all e-mails will be investigated, the Sheriff’s Office reported.

E-mails that investigators believe are serious threats, such as new Nigerian scams and phishing schemes, will be made public on the Sheriff’s Office’s Web site, www.colliersheriff.org, under the link “Stay Safe.”

“We can get the latest ones that are being received by people and show them to the public,” sheriff’s Sgt. Dave White said. “There’s always a new twist on them.”

The idea for the e-mail address actually came from a Naples Daily News editorial published in mid-October, White said.

“We thought that was a good idea,” he said.

Anything authorities can do to help people protect their personal information and identities is a good thing, Paschoal said.

For his part, Paschoal said he deletes any suspicious e-mails he gets because he can’t risk downloading junk on his or his clients’ computers.

“Usually I pick them off right off the bat,” Paschoal said. “It’s a mind set. As soon as you see something that even remotely looks like something like that I shy away from that.”

By Dec. 20, the Sheriff’s Office hadn’t received any e-mails to the new account, White said, but he believes the account will prove popular once people realize it’s out there.

Though authorities promise to investigate all the suspicious e-mails, they don’t plan on making a lot of arrests from the information they receive. Most importantly, investigators are hopeful that by opening up a new line of communication with the public, they’ll be able to help prevent residents from becoming victims of e-mail scams in the first place.

“Most of these are cross-border schemes,” White said. “Our chances of tracking someone down to Africa are slim.”