So here I get this e-mail from some deluded dude who seems to have forgotten his own name halfway through the thing. He starts out by telling me he is Mr. Tanko Ayuba from Lome, Republic of Togo. Then he signs it at the bottom as Mr. Abarla Usman. So I know right away he's a fraud. Anyhow, his sob story is that he has somehow hoodwinked his corrupt government out of $8,500,000 and he wants me to be his American partner in his phony scheme for smuggling it out of the country, and he's offering me a generous 30% cut of the loot. This looks remarkably like the world-famous Nigerian Money Laundering Fraud. And he isn't even being very creative.
Now here's somebody else's idea for dealing with another of this sort. That's right, folks, turn around and perpetrate a reverse fraud back onto the perpetrator. Maybe even make him do a chicken dance in a busy public place! It seemed to work because these perpetrators have their powers of rational thought dulled by greed just as badly as they think their would-be victims have.
And the next e-mail in my in box tells me how I can get an unsecured signature loan at half the prime rate even if I have a bad credit rating. And then there's one telling me I've just won a million dollar diamond necklace and they want to know where they can deliver it. And then there's several dozen messages from sweet young ladies who tell me the things they just love to do and would I please click onto their web cams and watch them do it.
Many of these e-mails have disclaimers that say "This is not spam because you opted onto our list" which I know to be total hogwash because I've never opted onto any such list in my life. I've tried clicking on the Click To Unsubscribe links but most of them are dead links. So they're virtually shouting from the rooftops that they're a buncha frauds.
One year I joined a Sandlot Virtual Football league. Big mistake! That turned out to be a front to collect e-mail addresses and sell them to spammers. I think that got me onto at least 40 spam lists. I wonder how many of the free game thingies round and about the intermuck are like that?
Religious crusaders are an especially obnoxious source of spam, especially when they challenge you to a debate just to see how actively you respond, and therefore how much your e-mail address is going to be worth to the preparer of a spam list. I usually tell them I worship Zorb The Sacred Crocodile, who demands human sacrifice, and religious crusaders are his preferred victims. I'm sure that doesn't do any good, but it's kinda fun.
I just discovered somebody's clever idea! A hogwash e-mail address generator! You're supposed to sprinkle a few links to it round and about your site, and then when spammers send their relatively crude address harvesters to your site they will perchance, if you're lucky, follow the link and receive 100 hogwash addresses and then loop back through again and receive 100 more, and the cycle will repeat itself until the operator discovers he's stuck in an infinite loop and his address file is full of garbage that he's gotta get rid of.
I figure all unsolicited commercial e-mail is fraudulent. The only legitimate group e-mail is stuff like notify lists, organizational mail groups, and newsletter subscriptions, all of which you need to not only apply for, you've got to respond to a verification message before they put you on. Everything else is fraud, but unfortunately here in the USA we've got almost no laws about spam. Now, there are millions of web pages telling you how to stop spam. All you've gotta do is get onto Google (or any other search engine of your choice) and search on SPAM. Lotsa luck, because nothing works.
And oh by the way, all you fat dudes from Nigeria and surrounding countries who just can't figure out what to do with your vast wealth, I know just the guy who could help you. There's this friend of mine named Jubilation T. Cornpone and he's the chairman of the Foundation for Utilization of Chopped Kale. He banks at the Last American United Great Hogwash Bank of Dawgpatch and his account number is OICU812. He'll gladly accept any size deposit you'd like to make. I'm sure he could give you some great investment advice, too. Perhaps a good deal on some underwater real estate in the middle of Lake Pontchartrain.
