You’ll have to excuse any abnormally large amount of spelling or grammatical errors this week. You see, I’m all a flush with excitement from an email I received from Mr. Solomon Johnson who has offered me the most singularly spectacular opportunity I have ever received from an unsolicited email.
Now, Sol – I’m going to call him Sol because he’s now my BFF – Sol understands that we all want to make a difference in the world and as a wealthy man (a $10.2 million fortune no less) he wants to not only help the less fortunate, but he wants to help me – and by helping me, help others even MORE, by allowing me access to his fortune (because he’s dying) to help the needy. Apparently dying people where Sol comes from can’t get access to their terrifyingly large wads of US currency.
So all I’ve got to do to earn this fortune is give Sol more information than I give to the US government to earn a security clearance. That sounds legitimate to me, I mean, you don’t just hand someone $10 mil without some information right? I mean, you have to turn over a great deal of personal information to get a driver’s license, so this is nothing. Bring on the giant check.
Fortunately, if you have enough brain activity to keep pumping oxygen into your body without conscious thought, you know that Sol is one of a myriad of scam artists who generally say they are from Africa (Nigeria is popular) and who, despite being enormously wealthy, cannot afford to hire someone to proof-read their email for simple English juxtaposition.
And if you’re reading this, I expect that you have a higher than average intellect and have probably asked yourself the same question I posit to you now… Who falls for this?
Well, as it turns out, enough people to keep this little scam going for something like 80+ years.
Yes, you read that right. This isn’t an invention of the internet age – but that’s a good place to start. According to ZDNET, spammers, on average, get one response for every 12.5 MILLION emails they send. This number is not made up apparently. It is the result of a study by researchers – probably researchers who sent 12.5 million emails until the US government answered one and gave them grant money. But I digress.
Anyway, after about 350 Million emails (one for every man, woman and child in the U.S. or thereabouts) they get 28 responses. This means that there are more than 2 dozen people in the U.S. at this very moment that are receiving and allegedly reading emails and who are clinically brain dead.
If you ever needed proof of the Zombie apocalypse, here it is. The Zombies are among us and they’re breeding. (In all likelihood, more prolifically than you or I)
Now the emails sent by Sol, are not stuff of well financed cyber criminals - the ones that use bogus web sites which look almost identical to actual bank sites and stuff. Thousands of people fall prey to those every year and they have my genuine sympathy. It’s not as if they’re guileless, just extremely unlucky. Like people who bought a LeCar. Ok, probably a bad example.
Sol, however is not alone in his perfidy. In 2002 – nearly 10 years ago when we were, as a nation, so much more innocent and gullible – the people running what is known as "the Nigerian scam" (like Sol’s letter) raked in $100 Million in the United States ... that we know about. (This bit of information is from a website everyone should have listed as a favorite called: http://www.snopes.com/ This site will help you determine the veracity of many urban legends and emails that you receive that start with the letters “FW:” in the subject line. Go to Snopes before forwarding emails. Please.)
So, in ‘02, Americans were bilked out of $100 mil and it wasn’t new even then. In fact, again according to Snopes, this type of ploy has been around since at LEAST the 1920s, when old fashioned paper was used and stamps were purchased and scammers could be discerned by copious paper cuts on their tongues. In the ‘20s, however, it was known as the “Spanish Prisoner” scam. The son of a fabulously wealthy Spaniard was jailed and they needed to raise money to get him out of a Spanish prison and they would pay you blah blah blah.
If we could just find the 28 people in question and take away their internet, you have to assume the emails would stop. There would be no point in sending emails asking for money if no one responded, right? But how do we find these people?
It’s urgent that we do find them because about 90% of the more than 2.8 million emails sent every SECOND, are spam – roughly the same percentage of junk mail I get in my real, paper post letter box.
So, here’s what I suggest. Everyone should send me their bank account data and passwords so I can do a full review and cross your names off my list of people who could potentially be answering these emails and thereby flooding all of our email boxes with junk.
After I receive all of this data, I’ll buy a small Caribbean island, a magnificent boat, and probably a sandwich because I’m sure I’ll be hungry by then; and I’ll put an end to spam once and for all by finding the 28 miscreants responsible for this mess.
If you need me before then, I’ll be hanging out with Sol.
No comments:
Post a Comment