Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Scamming the scammers



For anyone who has ever been bugged by that annoying Nigerian email scam (who am I kidding--that's everyone in the world, right?!), Dean Cameron's site is a must-read. (And I suspect the show is a must-see.) I have often thought of responding to one of those letters myself, but who the fuck has the time?! Well, apparently, Cameron did. (I wonder if he knew after his first short email that this would evolve into a full-blown dadaist epistolary novel?)

There are numerous gems in the correspondence, but here is one of my favorite passages (written by Cameron to one of the scammers, after an apparent lapse in communication that prompted the latter to get impatient): "I am so sorry that I have not been in contact. When I was in Canada, I was thought to have contracted a minor case of SARS and was quarantined for the last month in that allah forsaken country! It was horrible with a Capital YUCK!"

"Horrible with a Capital YUCK!" Now that's comedy.

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