The Good, Spam, And Ugly: Shooting It Out With Internet Bad Guys

Book excerpt: Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 18:38:09 +0000 (GMT) Subject: CONFIDENTIAL. . . To: [email protected] PROPOSAL FOR URGENT ASSISTANCE Dear Sir: I must solicit your confidence in this transaction. I am a high placed official with the Department of Finance Affairs in Lagos, Nigeria. I and two other colleagues are in need of a silent foreign partner whose bank account we can use to transfer the sum of $18,000,000. This are monies left by a barrister who died tragically in a plane crash last year. . . Sound familiar? Congratulations. You have been selected to become a mugu, an expression African con artists use to describe the targets of their e-mail scams. But they drew a bead on the wrong guy when they started spamming Steve H. Graham. Like many Internet users, Graham eventually got tired of receiving mugu mail and decided to fire back at his wannabe swindlers. Armed with a scathing sense of humor, Graham quickly turned the tables on his tormenters—with side-splittingly hilarious results. Whether he's referring to his fictional lawyer Biff Wellington, complaining about the injury he received while milking a lactating sloth, or offering the Preparation H helpline as his phone number, Graham—using aliases such as Wile E. Coyote, Barney Rubble, and Herman Munster—offers proof that spamming the spammers is the best revenge. Steve H. Graham is a retired attorney. Since childhood, he has been fighting for truth, justice, and free movie passes. For each copy sold of this book, he will donate 100 percent of the proceeds to himself. He is also the author of the cookbook Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man. He lives in Miami.