The pride of the e-mail scammers

A flurry of e-mails promising to make me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams would suggest that the clever Nigerian scammers have somehow managed to find their way around the spam filter recently installed on my computer here at work.

Bless their felonious little hearts.

While the Web crawls with thieving snakes, only those of the infamous Nigerian variety, in my humble estimation, can lay claim to the coveted title of true scam artists. No one works harder than they do to dupe us out of our hard-earned money, to tap into our wellspring of naivete and greedy delusion, and for that I must admit a grudging respect for the devilish work they do.

While lesser online scammers may come and go, these wily fellows remain forever in our in-boxes, diligently pitching their woeful tales of international intrigue, ruthless political maneuverings, bloody uprisings and outright mayhem.

Unlike their brethren in cybercrime – a grammatically sloppy and uninspired bunch of hacks – the Nigerian scammers clearly take some pride in what they do. That they’ve been creating their brief masterpieces of deception for so many years now, bilking Americans out of an estimated $1 million a day, is testament to their enduring professionalism and fondness for pulp-fiction narrative.

After reading their latest batch of artfully composed come-ons, I figure they must hold scamming seminars somewhere overseas, where the fledgling con artists go to learn from seasoned practitioners of the crooked craft the fundamentals of believable scam plotting, sympathetic character development, tortured syntax and the effective use of world events in setting an evocative scene.

I imagine workshops taught by professorial scammers in rumpled tweed jackets with elbow patches, whose job is to edit the rough drafts of their earnest students and recommend rewrites that would make them e-mail worthy.

“Drop imprisoned prince persona. Hackneyed!”

“Hook too far down in letter. Reel your fish in sooner.”

“Check date of coup d’etat. Historical accuracy a must!”

“Why the hard sell? First rule of good scamming: Gain their trust.”

“Needs more suffering, oppression. Don’t be afraid to pluck the heartstrings.”

“NEVER forget to state need for absolute confidentiality. Crucial!”

“You lost me after ‘widespread slaughter of my people.’ Be Clear.”

Aisha Mohamed seems to be learning her craft pretty well. As she explained in a recent missive, she is the 64-year-old widow of the late Sheik Mohamed Sani and is “suffering from long time cancer of the breast.” The poor thing went on to relate in painful detail the murder of her husband, who left her many millions, and the urgent need for me to help her spread her wealth among poor people of Africa, America, Asia and Europe. I was informed I had to act fast because she has only six months to live.

As a connoisseur of this odd new literary genre, I do think Aisha’s plea could have been a bit more polished. I wasn’t buying the whole philanthropy angle, either, novel though it was. But I’ll bet it was effective enough to wipe out some sap’s bank account, so who am I to argue with success?