Newsstand - web enthusiasts take up scam baiting

This one has a tenuous connection with frequent flyers -- the connection is that the scams involve foreign travel and I am sure all of you get these emails from time to time.

http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/030319/72/393vk.html

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">From www.scamorama.com (http://www.scamorama.com) to www.quatloos.com, (http://www.quatloos.com,) a half dozen Web sites are attracting dedicated fans to the online serialized comedies that result when scam artists are drawn into lengthy e-mail exchanges that poke fun at their get-rich-quick schemes, and, often, their grammar and spelling.

"It's a nice little hobby. It certainly beats stamp collecting," said Brad Christensen, a 52-year-old Phoenix man who in the past year has pretended to be an inventor, a bird watcher, and an eccentric nudist executive in his quest to waste the scam artists' money and time. </font>

and here is the travel connection I promised:

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">The scam artists usually pretend to be the wives of deposed rulers or civil servants seeking a business partner, and eventually they entice their victims to travel to Amsterdam or Africa to pick up their cash -- after they have demanded thousands of dollars upfront for phony taxes and transfer fees. The U.S. Secret Service estimates that the scam artists have managed to fleece victims of hundreds of millions of dollars annually. </font>

I thought this story was hilarious.

I have gotten those emails from the guy claiming to be the son of the deposed ruler of Nigeria. How anyone could fall for that is beyond me.

So what did you do with your 5 million, ACES?

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif

I just reply with some expletive...LOL

If you reply with anything, expletive or not, your email is considered to be valid and is sold to hundreds of other scumbag spammers.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Spiff:
If you reply with anything, expletive or not, your email is considered to be valid and is sold to hundreds of other scumbag spammers.</font>

True, but sometmes it is just to much fun to yank their cranks and get into a lengthy e-mail exchanges. I had this one guy selling a legitimate service but using "shady" practice so upset with me that we exchanged e-mails for over a week until I informed him that I was a customer of the company he represented and was going to print out all his e-mails (he had gotten very insulting, foul language)send them to the president. Last i heard of him and his spammer friends. I know I need a life but it WAS FUN!

Yeah, but thats what a junk mail filter is for, I get all the messages I want, others go right into trash. It is fun to pull their chains.