I’m a simple man that enjoys simple pleasures. It doesn’t take much to get me wound up. Every time I open my email it’s like Christmas morning. As the page slowly loads the excitement builds until I see… 2 New Messages! Hooray! Who will they be from? Will I need to reply right away? And if I do, that likely means another message back to me. Yippee, 1 New Message!
But lately my Christmas mornings have been soured. Someone is taking a dump in my stocking and I don’t think it’s Santa. It’s some scam artist from across the sea. The gleeful squeal that comes with my new message announcement quickly becomes a guttural howl when my inbox reveals it’s someone by the name of Louis Ipang of the Aeon United Capital Bank in Kuala Lumpur telling me I have millions coming my way, but first they need a bank account number. Man that ticks me off. I was hoping it was an email from my uncle with those funny pictures he always sends me of cats wearing sweater vests or something.
I know what you’re thinking. Cats in sweater vests, that’s hilarious! But you may also be thinking, there’s nothing we can do about these spam email shenanigans (or spam-e-nanigans, if you like). But I disagree. It’s time we fought fire with fire. Stay with me on this… we’ll all start new careers as scam artists. C’mon, it’s the ultimate start-up business, requires very little schooling and if you’re really successful Leonardo Di Caprio will play you in a movie. Leo! So, it’s settled, hence forth we shall all be conmen and… conwomen? The lady cons? What’s the feminine of conmen?
I should clarify. I don’t mean one of those cool movie conmen that swing into town by limo, bilk all the rubes, then slip away with the burg’s best dame while everyone chases after with pitchforks and torches. I can’t back that up. Those guys have moxie out the wazoo and they can talk a woman out of her knickers in a New York minute. Me? One time I bumped into someone at the post office and accidentally said “poop-scuse me” instead of “excuse me.” I’m not sure what I was thinking about, but I’d say that proves I’m about as smooth as Edward James Olmos’ face.
We don’t need fancy duds or slick-talkin’ to be competent scammers. We can succeed as nameless schlubs on the internet. The world wide web was built on the backs of nameless schlubs (and nudie pictures). Besides, we can’t do much worse than these jokers who keep emailing me in broken English about my alleged lotto winnings in the Republic of (insert random disputed Republic, which obviously has wi-fi). Here’s an actual email I got this week:
‘Sender: Foreign Transfer Manager!
You’ve won 891,934.00 pounds. Send necessary information: name, age, country. Via email.’
First off, why would the Foreign Transfer Manager have an exclamation point after his title? Is that supposed to grab my attention? “I don’t send my ‘necessary information’ to just any Foreign Transfer Manager, but this is the ‘Foreign Transfer Manager!’, I better get my Social Security card.” Secondly, it just says I won 891,934 pounds. They probably mean British Pounds, but without the British Pound symbol I can only assume I won an impossible weight gain to be attached to my person by an intricate pulley system. Is anyone falling for this garbage? If you want to scam me you have to earn it. Let’s see some official seals or watermarks or at least a title that includes the word embassy somewhere.
These guys are getting lazy, so it’s time for us newly-christened scammers to make our move. I know just the person to become our first chump too, Mr. Louis Ipang in Kuala Lumpur. I say we each send him 1,000 emails of cats wearing sweater vests. I’m guessing it gets less and less funny after you reach the 1,000,000th one. Sure we won’t make any money, but we can take pleasure in knowing his Christmas morning is going to suck.
Published: IN Michiana Magazine, August 2010
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