We've got spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam

I am SO excited right now! I just received an email in which the Subject line informed me that $1.5 MILLION are waiting for me and all I have to ----

Oops. Never mind. Turns out that’s a spam.

Oooh wait! Listen to this! It seems that this poor woman, the daughter of a former government high-up muckety-muck in Nigeria needs my confidential assistance in holding some of her late father’s $14.7645 Billion in savings, and if I send her my bank information for her to make the deposit, she will gladly pay me for my troub ----

Damn. Another spam. I really had hopes for that one. I mean, she even blessed me in the name of the Lord (Halleluyah!). How can you doubt the integrity of woman like that?? Oh well.

Ahhh – here we go. I can increase the size of my ….

Oy!!!! We’re definitely not going there! I wouldn’t touch that one with a 10-inch pole…

As gullible as I may be with some of these, at least I’m smart enough to know that the offers to increase my breast size aren’t real, and I definitely don’t believe that some 20 year-old sexpot happened to look at my profile somewhere and thought that I was fascinating and sexy and can we get together soon.

Even I won’t fall for that one.

But I can’t help wondering about this abundance of scams which I am constantly receiving. Obviously the fact that there are so many of them, being sent, some more clever and creative than others, others more transparent, tells me that there must be people – a LOT of people – who fall for them.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t get that! Who the hell will receive an email from Sister Marjorie Kenyatta asking for bank account details, and truly believe that by giving those details, the random person with a sob story will deposit $15 quazillion into their account for a couple of months and pay them $2 million for their assistance?

I guess there are those that do believe it – or we wouldn’t still be getting those same damn emails (albeit under different, equally exotic names) week after week, year after year. Over the past 6 years I could have become a billionaire several times over by now, if I had only allowed the love in my heart to help out my fellow man in dire straits Nairobi-style…

While some of these scams are so pathetically simplistic that we can’t help but to laugh at them, what I find scary is that many others are becoming more and more sophisticated and clever.

For example – lately I have seen a few times where a friend’s email account was hacked, and an email was sent to everybody in the person’s address book – ostensibly from the person, saying “I’m in _____ (fill in the blank – most often I’ve seen London) and I was mugged – now I have no money to get home and I’m scheduled to fly out tonight! If any of you can you please send me _______ (fill in the blank – usually not too ridiculous an amount) to help me get home, I’ll pay you back as soon as I can get to my bank.”

This is a pretty intelligent one – until you’ve seen the same damn thing 2 or 3 or 17 times. But the first time? I can imagine even an intelligent person falling for this one.

What blew it for me was the first time I saw it, the hacker had sent it – not only to all of the hackee’s friends, but a city-wide mailing list as well.

Maybe it’s my own naiveté, but I can’t help thinking that if these hackers and spammers and scammers would take all of the energy and creativity and whatever else they have that they put into these attempts at taking what little money I have, and put even some of that energy and creativity into actually working – they probably wouldn’t need the scams to live a very comfortable life.

Then again, who knows?

All I know is that here I am stuck in the Nigerian Airport being mugged at gunpoint by the daughters of 348 deceased bankers, diplomats and honourable politicians all trying to put money into my bank account, and I just want to get home. So if any of you can send me some money to get out of here, I promise to either pay you back tomorrow or to give you the secret to increase your bust size.

And may the Lord bless you forever and ever. Amen!