Flash Fiction Online has received a couple stories in the slush pile related directly or indirectly to the “Nigerian-type” e-mail scams, where the recipient will receive sixty percent of $26 million if only he or she will accept it. I remember a company that I worked for receiving similar proposals by fax more than twenty years ago.


One wonders why the scammers continue infinitely pitching their spam when everyone knows they're a scam and has received 20, 50, 100 pitches. As this story shows, one sucker is all they need out of hundreds of thousands of spam.

Follow-up by way of our editor, Jake: scamming the scammer. You'll want to follow this and have the side-benefit of a post and book review by Cory Doctorow, who coincidentally, studied under me...never. The "link (via waxy)" leads to the sequence of letters by which the scammer was scammed.