Virtually everyone with an e-mail address has received spam "get rich quick" offers, but British comedian and TED speaker James Veitch's solution was to engage the spammers with hilarious ongoing responses. Dot Con reproduces those laugh-out-loud back-and-forth e-mails that sometimes continued for weeks. "I figure any time they're spending with me is time in which they're not scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings," writes Veitch.
Veitch's imaginative and droll e-mailed replies are subtle sucker punches that often seem to fly over the heads of the scammers. One e-mailer asks, "Have I got your attention?" three times in one short e-mail. Veitch's brief first reply is: "Sorry, can you repeat that? I wasn't paying attention." Most of the scams begin with people either finding money or needing to move money to another country and they're willing to share millions with Veitch if he acts as a middle man. Of course, they need his banking information and passwords and eventually he will be asked to pay several thousands of dollars in document processing fees. Another scammer pretends to be a friend who needs money wired to him. Veitch stalls, insisting the friend writes him a blurb for his upcoming novel the scammer supposedly read. "Just 30 words about the main plot twist and the bit with the robots and the milkmaid," Veitch requests. Several e-mails later, the blurb arrives.
Fans of Don Novello's The Lazlo Letters or Ted L. Nancy's Letters from a Nut will find an outrageous and wry new outlet for hilarity in James Veitch's Dot Con. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant