This morning I received the following missive from the rather ditzy-sounding YankaYany Yana:
Hi! My name is Yana, friends and relatives call me Yany.
I am a sociable and cheerful girl and it would be interesting to me to get acquainted with you. I am single and this is why I have decided to write to you. It is spring now and I like this time of year very much, I think it is a great time for acquaintance. If you are interested in getting to know each other then I will be glad to see your letter and picture!
I wish you a good day!I will wait for your email,
Yanka.
Along with which, a selfy snapped with her Nikon:
Yana, with shitty photographic skills like those, you will be waiting for a long time for anyone’s email. If you’re going to take snaps of yourself in the mirror, may I suggest using a phone camera like everybody else in the world does? There are at least two advantages to this:
1. You’d get a shot of yourself in focus, rather than an ad for Nikon.
2. The camera wouldn’t take up more of the picture than your face.
Also, you might want to clean the mirror so that it doesn’t look like you’ve got a big booger on your nose. Oh, and picking up the crap in the background wouldn’t hurt either.
Captain George Biffers Ishmael contacted me this morning, with exciting news:
Am a captain with Royal Caribbean Luxury cruise ship, my name is George Biffers Ishmael, I am 57 years British born but i relocate with my late dad back Egypt when i was 12, my dad was originally from Egypt.i later return back to UK. am a member royal Caribbean luxury cruise ship, I was deployed as a rescue team of the italian cruise ship Costa Concordia disaster on 13 January 2012.I would like to share some personal information about my personal experience and role which I played in the pursuit of my career which was at the fore-front of the italian cruise ship Costa Concordia disaster Tuscan island of Giglio italy.
I will need you to assist me to received This funds in a consignment.As soon as i hear from you i will give you details after reading my mail and reading the site please reply.
Anita George
So, reading between the lines here, it’s now blindingly obvious what happened to the Costa Concordia, right?
My new friend Fernando Tobin wrote to me on Tuesday with some New Year’s advice:
From: Fernando Tobin
Subject: Secrets_Get any woman with questions.
Date: 1 January 2013 4:20:01 PM AEDT
To: Reverend
_Attn _Men
_Getting __ any women_ Secret
If you want to learn how to turn on any woman in the world, then we will help you make this happen…get ready, because once we teach you how to do this, there is no turning back.
There are 3 questions that will turn on any woman right after they hear them…They really do work…Do you want to know what these 3 questions are?
Oooh. No turning back. That sounds more like a threat than a promise.
Fernando left me a helpful link to a video, which wasn’t actually a video unfortunately, because that would have been both honest AND entertaining. But the 3 questions. Whatever do you think they might be?
Violet Towne is selling her car at the moment. Imagine her surprise when, before she’d even uploaded pictures of the item to the online site, she received a text from an interested buyer. She sent her email address.
This morning, ‘Ken’ replied:
Hello,
Thanks for the swift response, I need you to understand that i am willing and ready to purchase it right away as i really appreciate the price stated in the AD, however i will like you to re-confirm the price by stating it in your return e-mail for verification, possibly have more pictures of it,and consider me as your favorite buyer as i am buying this for my Dad and due to the nature of my job and my present location as i am a marine engineer…i will not be able to come for inspection,i’m a very busy type as i work long hours everyday,i have gone through your advertisement and i am satisfied with it.
As for the payment..i can only pay via the fastest and secure way to pay online i.e (PayPal) here, as i do not have access to my bank account online,but i have it attached to my pay pal account, and this is why i insisted on using pay pal to pay.
I have a private courier agent that will come for the pick up after the payment has been made …so no shipping included and With the issue of my details,transferring the name of ownership and signing of all paperwork will be done by the courier services company agent so you don’t have to worry about that.
It will be so sweet if you can send me your PayPal email now so i can pay in right away and also include your address in your reply as i don’t really have much time on here.If you don’t have a paypal account, you can easily set up one…log on to www.paypal.com.au and sign up its very easy… i would have loved to talk to you on phone but i work mainly on the sea and our phone network is down on the sea right now due to bad stormy weather, that was why i sent you a text, i even wonder how my message delivered to your phone but for now we can only communicate through the same mailing channel.await your reply asap.
Regards,
Ken.
Ah, Ken, Ken, Ken. The first and most egregious mistake you made, old salt, was to be unoriginal. You could have been a lighthouse keeper; you could have been a sergeant in Afghanistan; you could have been an astronaut, for Pete’s sake. You could have been a contender. Instead, you copied & pasted the same cruddy old racket that a bunch of other scumbags are using, thus nailing your credentials to the mast and allowing us to easily scry the cut of your jib in mere seconds by searching ‘marine engineer scam’.
Ken, I don’t want to take the wind out of your sails, but even plopping the word ‘illiterate’ in there might have gone some small way towards making your story sound more plausible.
As in: ‘I am an illiterate marine engineer’. Or ‘I am a very busy – albeit illiterate – type, with little grasp of grammer or reasonable sentence structure, and also a broken computer keyboard’. Well, that last bit is implied, so no real need to include it word-for-word, but you get the drift.
You might also want to consider some other amendments to your yarn, if you intend to have even the slightest intention of keeping your powder dry. First, don’t ask to see ‘more’ pictures of something if you haven’t seen any in the first place. Secondly, as philanthropic as I’m sure you intend it to sound, no-one gives a flying fuck whether you’re buying the car for your Dad, your parrot-shit bedecked peg-legged uncle or your retarded brother. We all know that ruse.
Another thing that has the distinct aroma of bilgewater about it, Ken, is the claim that you can access PayPal on your storm-tossed engineering project out there on the high seas, but not your bank account. Now why, do you suppose, that could possibly be? Is it something to do, perhaps, with the same special Nigerian technology that allows a very prompt text message to get through, but not any other kind of phone contact?
In short, Ken, it would be sweet if something terrible and quite agonizing happened to you very very soon. In my mind’s eye, I picture you being swept off the deck of the HMS Scumbucket by a humungous tsunami, and flung into the cold dark depths. There, I envisage you being torn limb from limb by a giant squid, and finally shredded into fibrous strips by tiny hungry crabs.
In the meantime, try not to stab yourself in the eye with your fork.
In case it’s not clear how this swindle is meant to work, faithful Acowlytes, it’s what’s called A False Payment Scam: the ‘buyer’ has no intention of taking delivery of the car. Instead, when the sale has been agreed, Ken sends a confirmation email that he has paid the money into the victims’s PayPal account. He has also included a ‘shipping’ fee, which is required by the ‘courier company’ and which the victim should pay C.O.D. to the driver when the car is collected. Shortly afterward, the victim receives a forged (but official-looking) confirmation email from PayPal with the apparent total figure. However, it appears that Ken is wrong about the C.O.D. payment. PayPal cannot ‘release’ the funds until the courier company is paid up front… typically by a deposit into a Western Union account. Since the (clueless) victim thinks they have the money in their PayPal account, they go ahead and deposit whatever figure Ken has pulled out of his ass, straight into his Nigerian bank account. And that’s the last they’ll ever hear of Ken.
My new best buddy, John Steve (or The Man With Two First Names, as I like to call him) wrote this morning with this information:
I saw your email (in the Central Computer among the list of unpaid funds that was originated from Europe, Asia Plus Middle east,Americans) among the list of individuals and companies that your unpaid fund amounting 10 Million USD. Your email appeared among the Inheritance funds/contract funds that has been approved already for months. You are requested to get back to me for more direction and instruction on how to receive your fund.However, we received an email from SOMEONE who told us that he is your next of kin and that you died in a car accident Few weeks Ago. He has also submitted his account for us to transfer the fund to him including his International passport, we want to hear from you before we can effect the transfer to confirm if you are dead ornot.
