All Things Techie With Huge, Unstructured, Intuitive Leaps

Spam ~ Fighting Fire With Fire


When you sit for long periods of time in front of a computer, and you have a fertile imagination like mine (and we all know what makes things fertile), weird and wonderful ideas pop into my head.

I regularly get spam from countries like Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and other places that tell me that the sender has access to millions of dollars and needs my help to get at it. I just have to send my identity, bank account number, a payment or two to facilitate things, and I will be a millionaire. Yeah right. Not only are they spammers, but they are scammers.

One thing that I have learned while writing healthcare software to be misused by cheating Nigerians, is that they are very very superstitious. Knowing this, I have decided to fight fire with fire when I get a piece of spam from them.

I have a throw-away email account that is mostly anonymous, so I use that in my arsenal. I send them a return email to all email accounts in the spam (usually there is an originating email address and one in the body of the email). I send them an email worded something like this:

You are an evil man. You are dishonest piece of dog scum. You send emails trying to steal money from people. I am disgusted by pigs like you. So I have gone to the voodoo Obeah -- the witch doctor and I had her lay a horrible curse on you. You will have horrible luck, and a terrible life. You will become sick. The curse cannot be lifted. I have given over possession of your soul to the Devil to play with. You will probably die within a year of a horrible disease. Your evil will be punished. People will piss on your grave.

Ha ha aha ha ha ha ah ha ... you are doomed .. just for a stupid email .. ha ha


One thing about living in Caribbean, I learned about Obeah, the west African magic, and it adds cred to my email. They know all about Obeah.

I get a remarkable sense of satisfaction in jerking their chain, because I KNOW that culturally, they can't help worrying about an email like this.

No comments:

Post a Comment