Lately, fewer of my e-mail correspondents are interested in selling me drugs and more want to loan me money. Here's an e-mail that just now arrived, somehow making it past my intricate series of Spam filters…
Here is Buford Craft. I write to you because we are accepting your mortgage application. Our office confirms you can get a $220.000 loán for a $252.00 per month payment. Approval process will take 1 minute, so please fill out the form on our website.
Now, there is zero chance I will ever order drugs from a stranger on the Internet. I don't really need any drugs but if and when I do, I'll get them from a slightly more reputable source…say, buying them from that guy who came up to me the other night in a parking lot and asked if I wanted to score some "dynamite crack."
And I don't need to borrow any money, thank you, but if and when I ever do, it won't be over the Internet…and it especially won't be from someone who calls himself "Buford Craft." Where, I wondered, did the presumably-overseas person who composed this message pick up that name? I mean, the guy was clever enough to insert an accented letter "a" into the word "loan" so no Spam filter would flag it. Couldn't he figure out that Buford Craft was not a name that would suggest a stable, reliable business associate? I wouldn't buy live bait from someone named Buford Craft.
So I googled Buford Craft…and don't waste your time. All you'll find is that someone by that name was a pallbearer at a funeral in 1970, and the obit is posted on the web. I'm guessing the loan shark just scours the Internet at random for proper names and plugs them into these inviting e-mails. Perhaps an automated bot does it, the same way it scans for domain names and e-mail addresses.
But the nice part is that whoever transmitted this e-mail wasted his time — and not just because almost none of us will fall for this racket. Most of these things, I'm told, are sent out by people and programmers who work on commission. If they somehow manage to snag a sucker and deliver them into the main scammers' clutches, the e-mailer (Buford, in this case) gets a fee or a cut. Just to see what would happen, I clicked on the link that was included to take me to the website where I was to fill out the form…and got a dead end. No website there. They probably either fled or were closed down. You can't trust anyone these days.