Monday, September 10, 2007

The Splendor of Scammery

Here's a great little article from The Washington City Paper on a particularly sophisticated email scam. Read through the entire piece. The story itself is fascinating, but it gets especially interesting towards the end.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ok, i read the article and it is pretty good. But my theory is that the real scammer is Arin and he has just made up this dopy lawyer tale to push his book. And if it is real, i certainly don't believe that Sheena is gay -- that is just what she tells dopy lawyers like Arin so that they won't hit on her.

Anonymous said...

for what it's worth, Arin is (almost definitely) a chick:

"I said to my mother, “Mom, to me this feels like I’ve met someone on the Internet, and I think maybe I want to go on a date with him, and he’s asking where I want to register for our wedding.”"

way to assume the doofus lawyer is a man!

Anonymous said...

OK, so i googled Arin Greenwood and found the blog -- http://aringreenwood.com/about/

With a dog named "Barky" and a cat named "Arnold" you are most definitely correct, Arin is a chick. And you must of gueesed by now that I am an oblivious straight white male who naturally assumes that anyone gullable enough to be taken in by the scam must be a dude.

Anyway, here is a sample post from her blog.

Notes from the Bus
June 13th, 2007

So I’m on the bus in Boston today, and this woman sits down next to me and starts asking about the weather. Is it going to rain tomorrow, she asks, and I tell her I don’t know but I think maybe it’s going to be hazy all week. Oh, she says, that’s good, it could be worse.

The bus stops and some eccentric-looking guy with a beard and white pants gets off the bus. The woman sitting next to me makes a face and says that ever since the state hospitals shut down there have been a lot of crazy people around Boston. For example, last winter she was shopping at Target and when she went to check out a person came up and tried to bite her on the arm (luckily she was wearing a winter coat). And then after the attempted biting, the person apologized and said that he only tried to bite her on account of a mental disorder.

You just never know, she says. Not anymore.

And then she looks at me and I look at her and I suddenly wonder: Is she saying that she might try to bite me? Or does she think that I’m about to try to bite her? What would happen if I did try to bite her?

PICTIRE OF:
(Arnold in trash can, Saipan)

No one tried to bite anyone in the end, though another guy on the bus, a guy who was wearing a wedding ring, I might add, looked awfully wistfully - hungrily, even - after a woman who got off at another stop.