…or, Lots of animals here…would you like to ride on your own ass??
They are as desperate as they are formulaic. And with the spread of the Internet, the so-called “Nigerian letters” have grown from being an occasional curiosity to a relentless plague on our in-boxes.
Under a subject line that reads “Urgent and Confidential,” these scams usually open with, “I am in search of a reputable person to assist me with an urgent business matter.” And they go on to explain that some important government official has died and that there is a need to remove a large amount of money from the country before other officials seize it.
“Any help you provide in the effort,” the e-mail usually says, “will be repaid with a large percentage of the money.” And while the ubiquity of these scam emails should undermine their effectiveness, somehow they persist.
In 1996, Steven Cooper was receiving an average of four or five of the letters by fax and e-mail per day. “What got to me about them was the sheer quantity,” says Cooper, a fifty-one-year-old chemist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “They’re also amazingly foolish and blatant scams.
So one day Cooper decided to reply.
Using an alias, he wrote that he wanted to learn more about the business offer. And with that, he began a ten-year habit of scamming the scammers as he wove elaborate webs—often cast with characters drawn from history or famous works of fiction-looping the scammers into drawn-out correspondences that sometimes lasted up to a year.
“These scams are ridiculous,” he says. “But they’ve definitely provided me with quite a bit of fun.”
For every half-baked explanation a scammer sent about the origin of the money, Cooper included an implausible feature to his own story.
With each fake tax form or faux lawyer’s bill that the scammer sent to justify the need for small amounts of money, Cooper replied with a fake newspaper profile or an official-looking travel itinerary to bolster his own responses.
Before long, Steven Cooper found himself juggling multiple stories at once, spending close to twenty-five hours a week keeping the scammers looped in. “I’m much more efficient now since I have a lot of the documents on file,” he says. “Still, creating new stories takes a fair amount of work.”
But none compare to his masterpiece about Don Quixote. “I think that was definitely my best work,” Cooper says.
After being contacted by an African scammer calling himself Derin Owolabi, Cooper responded as Don Quixote. “I do not know if I can help you but I do take pride in supporting worthy quests,” Mr. Quixote wrote. “I am a country gentleman, no longer young.”
Always sprinkled with direct passages from Cervantes’s classic work, the communications quickly culminated in Owolabi’s request that Mr. Quixote come to visit him in Benin to finalize the deal.
Mr. Quixote agreed to the request. But first he explained that he would need to travel with two others. “My party would include my faithful servant, Sancho Panza, and my Lady Dulcinea,” he wrote.
All are welcome, Owolabi responded.
Next, Mr. Quixote wrote that there was a problem with the flight: Air France said that he could not bring his horse on board.
“If Air France does not want to carry your horse, don’t worry,” Owolabi replied. “I am going to make arrangements to hire one for you in Cotonou. “
Many letters and much planning later, the two men finally spoke on the phone. Owolabi mentioned that Mr. Quixote sounded young for his age. Never passing up an opportunity to press the limits of credulity, Mr. Quixote replied that, in fact, he looked even younger than he sounded because he had received plastic surgery. “I owe all my looks to Dr. Polly Urethane, a plastic surgeon at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Fe,” he said.
Finally, after sending Owolabi their official travel itinerary, Mr. Quixote and his entourage set out on their journey.
Unfortunately, Mr. Quixote ran into problems after he lost his temper in Paris.
“French See Red over Attack on Moulin Rouge” was the headline that ran in the SOCIÉTÉ DE L’OISEAU EN CAGE, which Mr. Quixote’s lawyer sent to Owolabi to explain what happened. The article said that three American tourists had stolen horses from Parisian police officers and charged the famous theater, ominously waving baguettes. After being arrested, the three were later released. Eventually, the lawyer said, Mr. Quixote and his group got back on their way. They flew to Cairo, where they were to proceed overland to Benin.
That’s when the real tragedy struck.
“It is with a heavy heart that I must convey to you the melancholy news that Mr. Don Quixote has been found dead in the north Sahara,” read the next e-mail that came from Mr. Quixote’s lawyer. Attached was a newspaper article-which like all of Cooper’s handiwork was impressively realistic-that explained that Mr. Quixote had been attacked by a pack of about forty men led by a man named Ali Baba. Cooper says that although he has been spinning ridiculous yarns for years in correspondences with scammers, few people ever seem to catch on.
“Considering that they are scam artists themselves, it’s incredible how thick some of these people are,” says Cooper, who has posted his many epistolary exchanges with the scammers on his Web site, www.redhotchilidogs.com. “The only time I’ve been snagged by a reference was a lady who realized that the picture I sent of myself was actually of our governor Bill Richardson.”
Cooper says that he has received half a dozen emails over the years from people who actually lost money in these scams. One person said that her semi senile father had mailed more than $45,000 in response to a solicitation.
“For me,” he says, “it just seemed logical to turn the table on these people.”
posted by Rena Silverman
Subtle muscular adjustments can show, from left, wistfulness, determination, and unbridled hopefulness.
