A month ago, in response to an item in my local Dorset Echo about some elderly internet user on Portland who'd be royally ripped off by an e-mail lottery scam, I decided to repeat my experiment of June 2003. I wanted to see how widespread the issue really was, by seeing how much of a tall tale the fraudsters were willing to spin to attract the eyeballs of your average Internet Joe.
So, I added up all the money offered to me by internet fraudsters, just to see how rich I was going to be.
And, my, hasn't the advance fee fraud business come on leaps and bounds in the last three years? In the month of October 2006, I received on less than 199 emails from fake lottery companies offering me anything from fifty grand to several million, if I sent them a small peocessing fee first. Then a larger one. And then a larger one.
The total, then, just for lottery scams, is:
253,349,239 pounds, plus two BMW 5 Series cars.
Ker-, and indeed, ching!
If you add to that all the emails I received from deposed African leaders, dispossessed Zimbabwean farmers, US Marines on the run with Saddam's war loot, and jailed Russian oil executives, we get a further:
758,021,304 pounds
None of these tight gits offered me a car, Beemer or otherwise.
So, if we add the totals together, I was offered a completely non-existent 1,011,370,543 pounds, and a couple of Matchbox cars. A billion. That… that… that's nearly as much as Kate Moss 'earns' simply for getting out of bed.
In the words of poor, dead Del Trotter "We could do anything with that kind of money. We could go for a Berni."
In other news
News. News from ducks. This would be my attempt to actually try to do something approximately sensible in the medium, and resorting, as usual, to type.
I would appreciate your feedback, sensible or otherwise. And if anyone can knock out a decent-looking logo, I will probably have sex with you, or something.
That is all.
No comments:
Post a Comment