Bob writes that he's only
Bob writes that he's only gotten three Nigerian scam e-mails over the course of the week. I'm not so lucky. I get about two of these a day, lately, all from guys who have English first names and Nigerian last names (such as "GEORGE OLA" or "MIKE RABIU"), and all of whom use computers with a broken caps-lock key. Perhaps this because the Dark Continent cannot afford a keyboard repairman. Or, perhaps, it is a longstanding practice in Nigerian culture to WRITE LIKE THIS. Or perhaps, they are all yelling at the computer, and their dication software -- far more advanced than ours -- is making the brilliant calculation to capitalize those words which are spoken with particular emphasis. The implications would be interesting to study. I imagine an illiterate society, which, instead of overcoming illiteracy, gets computers to do their reading and writng for them.
At any rate, these guys have computers, and they all have my e-mail address. My spam-to-regular mail ratio is currently at about 26:1. I'm seriously considering trashing all my current e-mail addresses and switching to a safe one that hasn't made it onto the spam lists. If you, too, are displeased with how these scam-artists take in regular folks for thousands of bucks each, you're sure to get a kick out of this e-mail exchange, in which a guy here in the states manages to scam enough information out of his scammer to get his ass thrown in jail.
Posted by Matt at February 13, 2003 3:55 AM
