Gullible's Travels

You won't believe where the Nigerian scams have taken us. Or maybe you will.

LIKE NEARLY EVERYONE ELSE with a computer, I have been receiving Nigerian scam e-mails, and their increasingly colorful variants, for more than 10 years. But I got one the other week that reached a new level of audacity. It began this way:

On behalf of the Trustees and Executor of the Estate of late Luciano Pavarotti, I hereby attempt to reach you again . I wish to notify you that late Luciano Pavoratti made you a beneficiary to his will. He left the sum of thirty one Million five Hundred Thousand Dollars.($31,500,000.00 )to you in the codicil and last testament to his will. This may sound strange and unbelievable to you, but it is real and true.

In comparing this scam e-mail with the hundreds that came before, I was struck by a single, salient element that made this one special. You were probably eagle-eyed enough to spot it, too. Namely:

Luciano Pavarotti.

Even on a scale of preposterously unlikely events, "some criminal in Nigeria wants to comb the Web to find a stranger to help him smuggle millions out of the country" is exponentially more believable than "Luciano Pavarotti bequeathed, y'know, me, one-fifth of his estate." Plus, the scammers spelled his name wrong once.

In a genre of communication that is already aimed at the terminally gullible, this one seemed to be aiming so low that it actually had to be part of some sort of strategy: Make the approach so ridiculous that, if you're caught, you can reasonably claim it was clearly a joke. The satire defense! And you could do it knowing that there were still enough morons out there to fall for it.

I think this is a brilliant idea, and hereby offer the scammers even less believable e-mail approaches:

• Greetings, insert name here! You and the entire insert name here family have been exclusively selected to receive $5 million in . . .
• Hello. My name is Tiffani Amber Moskowitz. I am the only living daughter of N'goko Kabothu, the former president of Sierra Leone, and . . .
• Hello. This is a chain letter. It has been circulating since March of 1982, and it is very, very bad luck to break the chain. One man who broke the chain wound up dying in a horrible accident. One woman who broke the chain became a drug addict and a prostitute, and died in the gutter. To continue the chain, the first thing you have to do is send $50,000 in small, unmarked bills to the person on the top of the list below, then . . .
• This is a demand for ransom. I have kidnapped your child. Don't bother to check, I have replaced your child with an identical-looking robot. To get your real child back, mail $75,000 to . . .
• Won't you please help me? I am being held captive in a gulag in the Soviet Union . . .
• Do you wish your breasts or penis were larger? Well, we can help! For just $40,000, we will send you a list of Web sites that offer products and services that can solve your problems . . .

Wait, this is rich! I swear this is true. As I was writing this column, I got a phone call from some jerk who told me: "Congratulations, you have just won the Pulitzer Prize." I listened for a while and just hung up.

Ha-ha-ha. How gullible do these people think we are?

Gene Weingarten can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com. Chat with him online Tuesdays at noon.