I like to mess with Nigerian scammers and often reply to their pleas for helping with illegal money transfers and such. Well this guy is brilliant. Scamming the scammer. You gotta read this.

Cyril is a little sneaky, though not quite sneaky enough. As you all know I receive dozens of scam emails on a daily basis, and to selection of them I recently sent the following reply:

Dear Mr. XXXXX

Thank you very much for you interesting email, it was kind of you to contact me with your proposition.

Unfortunately I am not in a position to help you at this point in time as my company are conducting a very important 4 year long research project on Advanced Handwriting Recognition and Graphology systems.

Our work is extremely intensive and vitally important for our clients. They have committed over eight million dollars to our project and we are nearing the final stages. After nearly 4 years of research and development we are now only three months away from the conclusion and I am afraid I can allow nothing to interfere with the project until its completion.

We are always looking for paid volunteers to help with our project. If you are aware of anyone who would like to earn money by helping with our project by providing samples of their own handwriting to us then please do read the submission information below. We pay US $100.00 per page of handwriting samples.

Sincerely,

Arthur Dent BSC. HHGTTG. PhD.
Director
Singlesideband Systems



YOUR HANDWRITING SAMPLES WANTED TO HELP OUR RESEARCH PROJECT.

We are looking for people to submit samples of their own handwriting to add to our database of hand written text. Currently we have over three hundred thousand handwritten pages from people all over the world and we are looking for more all the time. All the handwriting is analysed by computer and the data will then be used to facilitate the completion of advanced artificial intelligence systems for our client, Cyberdyne Systems.

We are currently looking for people to submit by email attachment, scans of their handwriting samples so that we can increase the size and thus the computational power of our preliminary database.

NOTE: We will supply the text for you to copy by email attachment. You do not have to write your own story, poem etc. All that is required is that you duplicate the text we send to you in your own handwriting on paper and then scan it and return it to us by email attachment.

Handwriting samples are very valuable to our project so Singlesideband Systems are prepared to pay US $100 (one hundred dollars) for every sheet of handwritten text that is submitted to us. However please note that the MINIMUM number handwriting sample pages you can submit is 100 (one hundred). Of course, you may submit as many as you wish above that number. We would certainly take as many handwriting samples as you are able to provide.

If you think you may know anyone who may be able to help us in this project, please contact me at my email address below and we will forward you very simple instructions on how to submit your handwriting samples by email attachment.



OK, so Cyril was one of the scammers who send me your bog-standard 419 scam to which I replied with the above letter, however Cyril though that it would be better to wait a few days and then contact me again under a different name to say he had heard of my companies project elsewhere.

Cyril has a lot of work in front of him...



From: Cyril Ifey
To: Arthur Dent
Date: January 17, 2006
Subject: Contribution to Database of hand witten text

Dear Arthur Dent,

Refering to the above subject, I wish to make contribution to the poject.

Send me details of text to be hand witten and guidelines as well information on how I will receive payment for my contribution.

Thanking you in advanve for the opportunity.

Cyril.

And so it begins..!

Continued here

I do like seeing the tables turned on people like this, these scammers tried it on with me a while back, with the old "i'll send you a cheque for more than the items worth, you cash it, take the money and wire the rest" routine.

There's a lady in the states who has a website here, another one who takes it and gives it back double,

Keep the stories coming I love seeing the scammers scammed.

That definatly made my day a lot better (I have conjuctivitis, so my eyes aren't great right now which makes me feel like crap)!

Thats the clinical term for pink eye, isn't it? Hope it get better soon.

I read that whole story and I thought it was crazy funny! Way to get back at the scammers.

I just came back from the doctor. Apparently it's allergies. That's the only thing about Fall. Thanks anyways.

Nice to see the scammers on the reciveing end of that.

u should have send the same email he sent u in the begining so he knows why he waz scamed by someone smarter

Those people scamming the scammers..

Since most 419 operations are organised crime, doesn't it occur to you that they will probably beat up some innocent person to do the hard work instead of going through the trouble themselves?