I read in Le Monde
today (sorry the article is in French) the story of a guy like anybody else,
who was receiving spam like anybody else.
The only difference is that one day when that Scottish guy named Craig
received 6 junk mails at once, he decided it was enough and started chasing
down the senders of that kind of emails.
A famous one is the one where you receive a mail from the wife of an
African dictator who inherited a huge sum of money but she cannot get hold of
the money without your help. So if you agree to pay a few thousand dollars for
the account setup fee or whatever, she agrees to give you a certain percentage
of the money (I can't believe how much money I could have made if only I
hadn't trashed those emails!).
Craig started to "play" with one of those emails, using a fake identity and
some photoshop tricks to make the guy believe he had all the money required in
cash.
The whole story was told in a weblog and every new step forward (mail exchange, comments from Craig, etc.) was a new entry in the blog, the whole thing with a certain humour, until the end when Craig finally met the guy reponsible for that scam at the airport of Dubai.
As far as I am concerned, I use Mozilla which filters junk mail, so I don't
get too bothered.
However, I never miss a chance to have some fun and to record the email
address of such junk mail (a unique oppportunity!) and to follow Scott Adams' advice (the author of Dilbert):
whenever I receive some other junk mail where I am requested to input my email
address, I look in at records to use the email address I had carefully kept
away from deletion!
Shouldn't we help spammers to know each other better? ;-)
Note that the article in Le Monde also mentions that "Le journal du Net", which started talking about Craig in France, reported that some less happy people than Craig believed the story and were robbed, kidnapped or sometimes killed after their arrival at the meeting point.
The 419 Fraud as it is called is also referenced on the website of the FBI, as well as other types of scam.
