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Saturday, August 04, 2007

. . . but God will know

I can see why people enjoy playing games with the perpetrators of Nigerian "419" scams. On a lark a few weeks back, I created an anonymous email account and used it to send a message back to the reply address on some piece of spam sent to me. My message was something terse and ambiguous like "How does our transaction proceed?" Sure enough, when I remembered to check the account a short while ago, there was a nice, meaty message of the "my bank's dead depositor had no heirs" variety, from "William Ammerman". The impression I've been given is that these guys will spend quite a lot of time on anyone who looks like "a live one." So for me the fun will be to see how much absurdity the guy will accept as he tries to land my psuedonymous mark. I won't bother supplying the pitch letter as you doubtless know what they are like. Here was my first response:
Hello, William,

I have just a few concerns about our transaction. The first is moral. Like you I am a family man and would want to shield my family from shame if a transaction like you propose were to come to light. However, I am a religious, God-fearing person and therefore I see that even though we may keep this transaction a secret from men . . . God will know! Please help me out here. I am expecting you have faced similar concerns yourself. What ensures the moral security of the proposal? A serious concern to me, so please help me out to understand. How does God react? What does He think when He sees us in this transaction?

Second, I am now a hiker with no fixed home. For security, I have deposited all of my identity papers with a special corporation where they cannot be accessed by anyone but the trustee for the predetermined expected duration of my hike (two more years!). Even I cannot override the instructions and safeguards, so the papers are out of my control for QUITE SOME TIME. Perhaps you are familiar with these types of arrangements for the safety of Americans who hike and trek within U.S. borders.

These worries aside, I am very excited about helping you and splitting this dead man's money between us with no one the wiser. So if you can help me get past the "God will know" problem and the problem that I don't have access to any of my papers for upwards of two years from this month, and don't have a fixed address or even a car, I will be very grateful to be cut in for a nice chunk of this dead man's money that you control. I would love to have some of his money, and I think about it often while I am hiking. Please tell me how I can still get some of that dead guy's money. Dead Guy doesn't need it . . . I really need it, but I am scared of God and I have no identity papers. I would never have vouchsafed my papers if I had known of this opportunity. Oh, what can we do? (I have a lot of free time while I hike--can we turn that to our advantage somehow?)

Thank you in advance for your wise answers on our partnership. I will await them at the next internet cafe.

Yours,

S. Peters
Now I'm thinking that maybe if he stays with me I will come up with the idea that if the "trustee" dies, I can get my papers back. Then work on the conspiracy. I can't remember how it works with inchoate crimes like attempts and conspiracies. Could you be guilty of conspiracy to murder an imaginary person if you thought he was real? You can be convicted of conspiracy or attempt to possess cocaine even if the substance was, unbeknownst to you, baking soda. And you can go away for trying to hire an undercover cop you thought was a hit man. Hmm. It's all slightly hazy, and I'm still never quite sure where the law of any actual jurisdiction ended and the Model Penal Code began, and then where the MPC ended and Prof. Fletcher's notions began. That's what happens when your Crim Law professor is rumored to have challenged a colleague to a duel. You start to wonder.


posted at 11:40 PM

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Loved this!! I wonder how often people respond with a carload of total s__t like this. The guy must be so frustrated to have you out hiking for 2 years. How can he reel you in? And the God stuff--hilarious!

August 18, 2007 10:04 PM  

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