Gotta Love Google

And their wicked sense of advertising. A few weeks ago the spammers found my account- I almost never got any notes in my spam box before then, and most of those were confirmation notices that I wanted. But now, 10-15 spams a day. And Google helpfully sticks a Spam recipe advertisement at the top. Spam veggie pitas- slice before serving. Spam Primavera - Toss with linguini, serve immediately. Mmm, Mmm! I don't know if I ever want to eat again. It was widely said when I was a youngster (and I believed it) that Spam was an acronym for "scientifically processed animal matter." Actually, I'm surprised that Spam allows their product to be associated with spam.

On the plus side, I've been winning millions of Euros and dollars every single day.

Which brings me to this story...

Woman ends up sending $400,000 to 'Nigerian scam' con artists

Apparently some poor sap from Sweet Home (across the valley, in the Cascade foothills) actually fell for that scam... yeah, the one that was well known when I started using the innertubez in '94. The teaser in my reader says,

How did an otherwise lucid, intelligent woman end up sending nearly half a
million dollars to a bunch of con artists running what has to be one of the
best-known Internet scams in the world?

Well, could be, umm, maybe... she's not a lucid, intelligent woman! Duh! Following are some excerpts:

Spears received just such an e-mail, promising her that she’d get $20.5
million if she would only help out a long-lost relative – identified in the
e-mail as J.B. Spears – with a little money up front. "That's what got me to
believe it," Spears said.

(break)

Then the amount she would get jumped up to $26.6 million – if she would
just send $8,300. Spears sent the money. More promises and teases of
multi-millions followed, with each one dependent on her sending yet more money.
Most of the missives were rife with misspellings. When Spears began to
doubt the scam, she got letters from the President of Nigeria, FBI Director
Mueller, and President Bush. Terrorists could get the money if she did not help,
Bush’s letter said. Spears continued to send funds. All the letters were fake,
of course.

(break)

For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of
dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and
bank officials, told her to stop, that it was all a scam. She persisted.

Well. My brother often laments that people never say "well, it's a free country," any more. Well, It's a free country. But when the well-meaning folks at the society for the Prevention of Taking Advantage of Idiotic Tendencies and Other Eccentric Shortcomings (POTAITOES) starts up a fund to reimburse this poor soul for all her suffering, I will be in line to help out big-time. All they need to do is send me $100 so I can buy and assemble the circuits for the wire transfer.