Get ready to get excited – I’ve received a simply incredible email.
A man I don’t know and have never met is offering to send me $11.3 million. That’s about £7.5 million to you and me. Wow!
Needless to say, I’m over the moon. I needed some more moolah, and here it is. Goodness knows how this little missive of joy landed in my Spam folder. I would never otherwise pass up such an easy opportunity for lots of free money.
All I have to do to get hold of the cash is tell this nice man pretty much everything about me. You’d think he might have more of an inkling, seeing as he contacted me first. But I suppose revealing my life story and bank account number are small asks compared to what I’m about to receive.
…yes, I know. It’s a scam.
Such a shame. It would be lovely to believe that anyone out there is really just going to email me with the offer of oodles of cash.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had an email like this, and it sure won’t be the last. For some reason, I get a lot of spam. It’s not hard to find my email address, seeing as I have both a website and a portfolio, and I’ve already navigated the waves of ‘free online casino chips’ messages. ‘Unexplained free money from dead people’ is the logical next step.
It’s the kind of thing I tend to ignore. Some people do the complete opposite.
Ever read the 419 Eater? It’s got a bunch of stories of people fighting back against scammers in quite imaginative ways. Like the guy who got an unwitting con artists to send him a carving. Or the one where they convinced someone to get a tattoo. Think of the ways you’d like to punish a scammer, and chances are they’ve already done it.
I don’t have the energy or time to be that sneaky. The closest I’m going to get to £7.5 million is reading it in the next email I get.
