The Good, Spam, And Ugly: Shooting It Out With Internet Bad Guys
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Publisher Description
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 18:38:09 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: CONFIDENTIAL. . .
To: honbarrsedd4za@yahoo.co.in
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Most of the internet-using public has by now received at least one unsolicited e-mail from someone in Africa (or elsewhere), offering a too-good-to-be-true, get-rich-quick scheme. According to author and retired attorney Graham (Eat What you Want and Die Like a Man), the stupidity of Americans has turned Lagos, Nigeria into "an upscale suburb full of spam mansions." Turning the tables, Graham replies to these malicious e-mailers with invented aliases and crazy stories that only a hapless, gullible schemer would believe: signing his emails with names like Barney Rubble, Graham tells his correspondents that he wants to "sell chia pets in erotic shapes" and "open Nevada's first drive-thru brothel for seniors." It's a funny premise-after all, it served three volumes of Ted Nancy's Letters from a Nut well enough-but Graham's humor often falls flat, and the back-and-forth e-mails quickly blend together. Amid juvenile, occasionally scatological humor, Graham provides middling comic anecdotes about himself and his family (such as his cousin, bit by a mongoose). At times, he's gleefully offensive, as in an unfunny commentary about midgets, taking on the persona of Adolph Hitler and describing one spammer as "not the brightest candle on the Kwanzaa menorah." While the idea of messing with spammers might entice, Graham's approach isn't for everyone.
