Sunday, 17 June 2007

Email Scams and storytelling

There are many of these scam emails around, promising millions of dollars in exchange for your bank details and some kind of security deposit. For a while I was collecting them, fascinated by the creativity and exoticism of many of the narratives in them.
My favourite was one in which a grand Nigerian lady, a widow of a high government official who had been poisoned at an embassy cocktail party (just picture the dresses and the canapes!), was trying to get a few million dollars out of the country. There was a metallic suitcase involved which had to be snatched from her brother-in-law and travel by diplomatic channels through Ghana and Hong Kong before it could reach me.
My email provider's spam filters, unfortunately, have been efficiently upgraded, and now I barely get any of these. So I was thrilled this morning to come across the Job Scam Repository. I had wanted to create an online picture book illustrating each story, but never came round to it, of course. Maybe now that I have the archive at hand...

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