They all start to sound the same.
"I need your help moving XYZ million dollars out of a foreign country bank thing! Please contact me discretely, as we need to be discrete! Thank you!"
In case you haven't figured it out, I'm talking about stupid advance fee fraud e-mails. Many people might know this as a "Nigerian scam", due to these originally specifying Nigeria as the country of origin. Which is total lies, but then again the whole thing is total lies.
Why am I bringing this up?
Well, because my author e-mail has recently been receiving a number of these messages. (If I remember, about a dozen over the past month or so.) Every one from a different e-mail source, so they cannot be blocked completely. They just end up in my junk folder, where I don't even look at half of them before sending them to...where every dead e-mail goes.
I remember getting these when I was back in college, on my college e-mail account. I only got a couple, and I promptly deleted them then, just as I did with the ones I've been getting now. For a while, I thought that the whole novelty of such a scam had worn off, and people just weren't trying it any more. Obviously, I was wrong.
I suppose that's what I get for making my e-mail a matter of public record. C'est la vie. Either way, I suppose I can get some amusement over how pathetic these e-mails are. I still don't understand how these e-mails fool people, and I'm writing a fantasy book series about a conman!
So if you happen to get such an e-mail, you know what to do. Chuck it. Burn it. And move on with your life. (This public service message is brought to you by Thadrick Clant.)
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