Scamming the Internet Spamming Scammers

For the past several years, my daughter -- Mattie Somer Smith Cummins -- and I have been hooking up with Internet scammers. The effort has resulted in more than 200,000 words ... and some of the funniest correspondence since Al Gore invented the Internet.

The book is in final editing stage and here is an unedited excerpt.


From: Dora Saki
Subject: ALL ABOUT MY LIFE
To: George Smith


Hello My darling,
How are you today? I hope you are doing pretty well. For me here is very cold here in Senegal. Like i think i told you before, i lost my parents.My late father Dr Oliver Saki was a minister of Works and Housing in my country. And he was also the managing director(Olive industrial company LTD) in Abidjan the capital of Ivory Coast my country before the rebels attacked our House one early morning killing my mother and my father as a result of civil war in my country. It is only me that survived the attack because i was in school then and i managed to make my way to a nearby country Senegal where i am staying now in refugee camp.. I am real suffering this moment. It is a great hell and less freedom here in refugee camp. And in this camp we are only allowed to go out every Friday of the week(once in a week). It's just like one staying in the prison and i believe by God's grace i will come out here soon. I don't have any relatives now whom i can go to, all my relatives ran away in the middle of the war, the only person i have now is Rev. Steve who is the pastor of the (Christ the King Inter'l Churches) here in refugee camp Senegal. He has been very nice to me since i came here but i am not living with him rather i am staying in women's hostel because the camp have two hostels one for men the other for women.

Here is the Pastor's Telephone number to reach me ( 00221777053160 ) if you call tell him that you want to speak with me and he will send for me in women's hostel. As a refugee here i don't have any right or privilege to any thing be it money or whatever that might be against the law of this Muslim country. As i told you before i want to go back to my studies because i only attended second year in university before the tragic incident that lead to me being in this situation occured.
My darling I want to confide in you and please listen to this, i have my late father's statement of account and death certificate here with me which i will send to you later because when he was alive he deposited some amount of money in one of the leading banks here in Senegal which he used my name as the next of kin. The amount in question is US $2.2M ( Two Million Two Hundred Thousand Dollars ). So i will like you to help me transfer this money to your account and from it you will send some money for me to get my travelling documents and air ticket to come over and meet you. I kept this secret to people in the camp here, the only person that knows about it is Rev.Steve because he is like a guardian to me.

So in the light of above, i will like you to keep it to yourself and please don't tell anybody about this because i am afraid of loosing my life and the money if people get to know about it. Remember i am giving you all this information due to the trust i have in you. I like honest and understanding people, a true visionary and hardworking. My favourite language is English but our language is french, but i speak English very fluently. Meanwhile, i will like you to call me like i said i have a lot to tell you. Already I have made up of my mind not continue to stay in this camp again! I will be waiting to hear from you soonest.Have a nice day.
Yours lovely, Dora.


MY REPLY
Dear Darling:

I have prayed about helping you. Most of the praying was at the Jehovah's Leanfeed Pentacostal Church in Barleyville. It is a church founded by born-aginners who were gastronomically challenged. You know, big ol' good uns that field dressed out at about 350 pounds and thought of a mile-long buffet as a snack. I used to be one of them hummers but after I went on the grapefruit diet, I lost more than 200 pounds. My wife got tired of eating grapefruit and left me. (That's supposed to be a joke, but she really did.)

My praying resulted in a decision: I will help you soonest!

Anyway, I couldn't help but notice that you didn't answer any of my querying questions in my last email. Why is that? I appreciate your information and especially about your plight. Plights is terrible!!!! I've had some in my life, for sure.

Here's part of what I wrote earlier and would like some commenting commentary:

Dora, from your photo you are gorgeous! For another, I don't believe I can help you. I am older ... a lot older ... and am not in the best of health, due to the wreck I had several years ago. You are 22. I have shoes that are 22, for God's sake.

I am live quietly on my ranch in Arkansas, watching a herd of illegal aliens tending to my herd of thistle-eating cattle and guinea hens and horses. I still get around, if you know what I mean, (there are always women who want something from me) but nothing like I use to.

For one so young, you are so insightful!!!! The world is not a bed of roses, but it is full of saw vines, pigfish spines and meadow muffins.

I would like nothing better than to have a serious relationship with you ... Hell! With anyone! ... but I have nothing much to offer other than my 4,700-square-foot house with a pool and hot tub, sauna, 650 aces in farm subsidy heaven, and a tender, generous heart.

I look at your picture and remember when, maybe, I could have been someone of whom you could be proud. This shell is no longer that person.

I will answer your questions below simply because you asked.

Likes? I like life, not at it is, but as it was. I am going to have a spine operation this fall and hopefully that will help me get back into traveling shape. Nothing I like better than traveling to foreign countries and sighting the seas.

Dislikes? Spam (the meat and the email kind), liver, brussell sprouts and anyone who would harm children and animals. Oh, I hate any bed sheets that are less than 1,000 thread count. Scratchy bastards!

What do I do for a living? Well, I used to be in the investment business, but don't have to do that anymore. I like watching the ebb and flow of stocks that I follow. Hobbies? I surf the Internet and occasionally check on a frisky site or two or look for bargains on eBay or look up recipes so I can get my online gourmet chef's certificate. I love massages and have three rubber-downers come by once a week. Very relaxing.

I am older, I said, and with my physical condition, life is not much fun.

Just looking at your picture gave me the biggest thrill I've had in ages. Seriously, do you know how beautiful and sexy you are?

For that, and your nice letter, thank you.

George "Bubba" Smith

NOW, I said I would help you and I would. My word is my word and I abide by it even when I wish I couldn't.

I tried calling Rev. Steve and he didn't answer. Some woman who spoke some sort of foreign language with a foreigner accent answered and I thought she said should could do my laundry on Tuesday but that can't be right. I do laundry on Saturday.

How much money do you need to get to Arkansas? I can get it out of my truss fund because a truss can't help my condition anyhow. How will I get it to you? What guarantee do I have you will actually come if I send you the money? Do you have to tithe some to Rev. Steve?

I will help but help me understand how and send me the information I asked for earlier.

George "Bubba" Smith

A horse of a different persuasion

I wish to make a pronouncement, several, in fact.

I’m not a liberal.

I’m not a conservative.

I’m an independent with fiscally conservative leanings.

I think Big Government is too big and the only ones who can change that won’t because they feel powerless. (Hint: You, me, the voters.)

I am for civil rights. Heck, I love civil rights, especially when they pertain to me.

And, I distain nutcases regardless of party affiliation, political bent, or something important like … hairstyle.

One of the biggest nut jobs around today goes by the name of Glen Beck. He is Rush Limbaugh clone, although a skinnier, shadow version of the first angry conservative pundit. Beck likes to take folks to the lick-log for disbelieving the political pabulum he spews on his television and radio shows. He seems to have a new target for this righteous indignation every day or two, and sometimes the target does not really seem to matter.

For example, Beck recently stated he will no longer use the Google search engine because of what he claimed were the site’s ties to government agencies and its so-called involvement in the uprising in Egypt.

Say, huh?

Spread that manure a little more smoothly, if you please.

Seriously, the man said, “There’s a strange thing going on with this search engine and our government and we all have to choose who we do business with.” (Without splitting too many fine hairs, the correct grammar for that statement would be …”to choose with whom we do business.”)

Personally, I like Google. I have used it for years and not once have I felt it was being used to overthrow this or any other government.

Not to let the Google matter drop after one stupid comment, Beck explained further: “I’m really not sure that I want my search engine involved in government overthrows, good or bad.”

It’s a major jump from scary to stupid, but Beck did it with aplomb and graceless energy.

The devoted followers –and believers -- of people like Beck are sheep, being led down a path of ridiculousness while trying to fervently embrace philosophical kinship with a minor celebrity and larger-than-life demagogue.

God protect us from the Glen Becks of this world. But, then again, if He was even interested in this mess, He’d already done something about it.

Time to kill a few rumors

Rumors are just lies told with supposedly insider knowledge. The rumor mills never stop, regardless of location.

So, for the record, here’s some rumors that have no validity and I take this opportunity to slap them down with a vehement spirit.

1) Sarah Palin will not run for president in 2012. Neither will Mike Huckabee. Neither will 12 politicians we don't know who have a good chance of winning the presidency.

2) The wife of the top Taliban spiritual leader was quoted as saying in an interview that she thinks President Barack Obama is “one hunky dude.”

3) Wal-Mart is going to revert to its traditional roots and pledges to provide exemplary customer service.

4) Soccer is a communist plot to keep good athletes from participating in football, baseball and basketball.

5) Those little stickers placed on fruit and vegetables are part of a terrorist plot to poison Americans. (I hate them durn things!)

6) Computers in all stores are always totally accurate in reading prices and weights.

7) When most adults say “it’s bout the kids” in regard to education, sports or extra-curricular activities, it’s always – always – about the kids.

8) No one in government has ever paid an individual to cast a vote a certain way or work to get others to vote likewise.

9) There are monied folks in this country who work hard behind the scenes to get certain candidates elected simply because they believe in good government without personal gain.

10) A recent assault by American warplanes near the Pakistani border with Afghanistan killed more than 15 sheep, leaving Osama bin Laden without a date for the 10th Annual Terrorist Prom.

More unvarnished police news, please and thank you

It’s a visceral thing, not a cerebral thing, this penchant for most humans to stare at those life-occurrences that repulse us. You know, the car wreck, ambulance in attendance. The house afire. The report of a drowning or hatchet murder or bombing.

It’s that same urge that makes reading the police report in some newspapers literary fodder for many readers.

A perusal of the police report in a community newspaper recently had some juicy tidbits – possession of marijuana, disorderly conduct, public intoxication, and the like. But what could serve as good back fence gossip was watered down by the legalese thrown into the report. To wit: Somebody named Charlene was charged with failure to maintain financial responsibility; a Billy Joe was charged with DWI and driving while license invalid with previous conviction; and Kevin was charged in Waskom with speeding.

What’s the real story? Where’s the guts, the info, the beef? Did Charlene stick it to a local merchant and not pay her bill? Was Billy Joe staggering-drunk or just tipsy? Did he blow a 2.4 on the breathalyzer? And was Kevin going 110 in a 30 mph. zone or just seven miles over the limit?

Police reports can be very entertaining. At several papers it was my pleasure to serve as editor and/or publisher, the court/cops reporter was instructed to take down the charges exactly as written by the arresting officer. Some were quite memorable.

In Las Cruces, New Mexico, this was the report by a citizen: “Mrs. XYZ reported a ‘strange’ man standing in her front yard urinating on her water meter. He was gone by the time officers arrived.”

In Mountain Home, Arkansas’ Baxter Bulletin: “The resident at XYZ East Main reported her cat had locked her out of the house. Officers went to assist and found she was using the key to her garage to try and gain entrance. No cat seen at the scene.”

In Selma, Alabama: “Councilman XYZ reported that at 2 a.m. every day for the past week someone had thrown a sack of dog crap in his yard. He wanted extra patrols in the area.”

Again, in Selma: “A report filed of a naked woman running down the middle of Highway XYZ. All officers on duty responded. An aggressive search of the area uncovered no naked woman.”

All police reports are interesting reading on some level. But most can certainly be improved by less editing and more “reality.” It stimulates the imagination, you know.

More holidays, if you please

I’m a selfish guy. Always have been.

If somebody has something I want part of it, or access to it. I like to share things that other people have. I don’t mind giving up some of my stuff – halfees, so to speak – but I want the same thing in return from others.

On some things, however, I don’t like to share: Food and my wife are top on my list. If you would like a bite of my hamburger or a French fry off my plate, I would rather buy you a burger or fries than cut myself short on the caloric intake portions.

There's one city in which I used to be publisher of the local paper which gives its employees 12 holidays. In my present work station, I get seven. I want 12. Or, more precisely, 12 more than I now get. Now, the city is considering giving the employees four more days for a total of 16. I have upped my “wants” list to 12 new holidays, which are already designated as “special days” by the Commission for Special Days, or some other titled government entity.

The four that the city is considering adding are: President’s Day, Good Friday, Emancipation Day and Columbus Day. I like all those days and want to be off too, even though I don’t know when some of those holiday are.

The federal government gives our public servants 10 holidays, including the normal ones, plus Martin Luther King Day and Veterans Day (The born-and-bred southern employees probably think of it as celebrating the birthday of Robert E. Lee.)

Come to think of it, I want more days than that. There are ton of special days that have significance of a high nature that should be considered for time off.

Examples:

 Poetry Day – January 13. Write a poem about a gnome before you go home. (I missed this one but will pick it up next year, for sure.)
 National Freedom Day – February 1. Who is against freedom, for gosh’s sake? And why shouldn’t we be free for this day? (Next year, promise!)
 National Peanut Butter Day – March 1. (What better protein stuffing fun is there, anyway?)
 National Phone Day – April 4. Celebrate the day the first telephone was installed by calling every contact in your cell phone and say, “God bless that Bell guy!”
 Hawaiian Lei Day – May 1. Celebrate by getting Lei-ed.
 Yo-Yo Day – June 6. Let’s all grab a yo-yo and forego work for much needed exercise.
 International Joke Day – July 1. Make it a good one and take the day off.
 Play in the Sand Day and Hulk Hogan’s birthday – August 11. Combine the two and do WWF stuff in the sand. Or in Quikcrete if it’s not raining.
 National Blueberry Popsicle Day – September 2. Nice way to greet the fall season. Where can you get a blueberry popsicle, anyway?
 World Teacher Day – October 5. If there ever was a day that deserved its own holiday, this is it.
 Button Day – November 16. Don’t know why there is such a day but it would be good to take off a day to rest up for Thanksgiving.
 Eat a Red Apple Day and National Pie Day – Combine the two commemorative days into one and eat a red apple pie. Take off this day to slice, bake and eat.

This is just 12 extra holidays and that’s 27 fewer than Japan employees have and 41 fewer than workers in Europe.

We deserve more holidays because, goshdarnit, we’re Americans and work too hard as it is.

It’s not a petty thing if it drives you nuts

When I was working at various newspapers, I was sometimes accused of being petty, of wielding the journalistic pen and using strong arm tactics worthy of a dictatorship in a Third World country.

Denying that makes no sense, just as the accusations, then and now, make no sense. People believe what they want to believe.

Always a proponent of pithy editorial comment that was aimed at creating an environment for thought, I, and a majority of editors that passed through the News Messenger doors, wrote editorials and columns to create a bias for action.

That does not mean those written words didn’t create some heartburn in some folks. Some were assuredly meant to do just that.

I can only conjure up one column that was, in my opinion, then and now, petty. It wasn’t about any politician, or local group, the local school system, postal service, city administration, or any subject that most folks might consider to be fodder for pettiness.

I remember going on a tangent more than 20 years ago about a pet peeve of mine and more than one person told me I was being petty and petulant. If something is so severely intimidating and irritating that it makes you want to take a 2x4 and beat some poor stranger, then, in my opinion, it is certainly not a petty matter.

It is my personal belief that every single person on this planet with an IQ over 12 has at least one pet peeve. My main pet peeve is those stupid little paper stickers applied to fruit and vegetables in grocery stores.

You know. Those little red-and-white or green-and-white stickers with the dumb numbers that are attached to the skin of fruit or vegetables with a mixture of Super Glue and Quikcrete.

Certain fruits – pineapple and kiwi come to mind -- used to be exempt due to outer skin covering, but even those has succumbed to the insidious SSP (Stupid Sticker Program).

Yeah, yeah, I know why they put them on there: Inventory control. I don’t care. It’s not rocket science to look at existing batches of veggies and fruit and order when the stash gets low. That’s the way it was done for centuries before scanners, and it by gosh worked.

As a consumer, it’s a rip off. The stickers add additional weight to the item and I don’t want to pay the extra freight, so to speak. The stickers may be lightweight, but the psychological weight is very, very heavy.

And, the stickers cost money and, assuredly, that cost is passed on via higher consumer prices.

Those stickers are the same thing as … well, parsley. Who needs parsley? Who eats parsley? Yet consumers are forced to spend millions of dollars a year buying parsley that has the nutritional value of mucous and is used strictly for decoration.

I propose a two-prong approach to dealing with this problem: First, join the organization GASOFAV (Get All Stickers Off Fruits and Vegetables). Protest quietly by removing every sticker from offending supermarket items or, for the more adventuresome activist, switch kiwi stickers onto cantaloupes.

Join this fledgling group and help get stickers off fruits and veggies and then we move on to ousting parsley.

If I had my druthers, I would druther see little red-and-white stickers on my mashed potatoes than parsley. The stickers simply taste better.

Hell froze over

Sarah Palin took an IQ test and finally scored in the three-digit range.

Harry Reid and Bill Bellichick were sitting at a table at a fund-raiser and both cracked a sincere smile.

Hillary Clinton had a picture published in the newspapers where she didn’t look, tired or mad as a wet hen.

You can’t believe any of the above, but you can believe what’s below.

Despite the budget deficit that defies explanation and has more zeros than a Nolan Ryan no-hitter, the government – the one run by people we elected to serve our needs – is spending money on projects and programs that are mind-bogglingly stupid.

The government funded a $700,000 study by the University of New Hampshire to study greenhouse gas emissions in the dairy industry. The study concluded that “cows emit most of their methane through belching, only a small fraction from flatulence.”

There was no mention of BS in the report, literally or figuratively.

The provost of the university said the study was “not wasteful. It’s important.” Apparently, he said it with a straight face.

In case you think the University of New Hampshire is the lone recipient of dubious federal largess:

1) Wake Forest University received almost $150,000 to study “preliminary data on the efficacy of integral yoga for reducing menopausal hot flashes.” That’s gummitese to explain how meditation and exercise might ease menopausal symptoms. It’s a possibility that taking a shotgun and shooting the holy heck out of a bunch of man-shaped targets might do the same thing.

2) Wake Forest (those grant-writing little boogers!) also got more than $70,000 to study the effects of self-administering cocaine on the glutamate system on monkeys. College students are gonna get high on getting monkeys … well, high.

4) University of North Carolina-Charlotte received a whopping $760,000 grant to develop computer technology to digitally record the dance moves of performers. Interesting project, assuredly, but how is such a study the business of the federal government?

5) In the past several years, more than $1 billion has been sent to dead people to pay for prescriptions, wheelchairs, pay rent, and even to help defer heating and air conditioning bills. More money than oversight, for sure.

6) $21 million in federal funds goes to Lockheed Martin from NASA to advance research for supersonic jet travel. The first benefactors of this technology is expected to be business executives.

7) The government spent $2.2 million to help pay for a new irrigation system to a San Francisco Golf Course, a public course that the city council is considering closing due to a species of frog and snake that are endangered and live in the area.

8) Your tax dollars went to pay the expenses of five students of the University of California-San Diego to go to Africa to study and report on why “Africans vote the way they do” in elections? Is it possible that a similar study in the U.S. would have been more helpful?

9) A company called NanoGriptech has been awarded more than $400,000 to develop sports equipment (read football and baseball gloves) to develop a technology that mimics the sticky feet of geckos. The far-ranging plan is to develop a technology that will allow robots to climb difficult surfaces.

10) And, finally, Indiana University professions received more than $220,000 to study why young men do not like to wear condoms. Eeeeewwwwww!

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. These are some examples of your tax dollars are work … and the attitude of those elected officials who approve such nonsense.