Scamming the Scammers

The Guardian has an interesting "meet the people behind the Nigerian email scams" article.  I post this because it reminds me of a story of a friend of mine who actually managed to scam the scammers back.

After receiving one of these scam Nigerian emails, my friend (will call him Jon), emailed back and pretended to play along.  Jon wrote something along the lines of "I'm very interested in your offer" and then made up a long and sappy story all about himself his family, and his children.  The idea was to convince the scammer that he had really found some naive American dupe.  They exchanged several emails in which they just got to know each other.  Eventually, when they developed a good rapport, Jon told the scammer that his son was a coin collector and that he wanted him to send several coins from Africa and Europe as a gesture of goodwill--a request to which the scammer willingly complied.  At that point Jon ceased contact with the scammer, now that he was a few bucks richer.  Not a huge payoff, but a pretty solid moral victory.

Update:  Here's a website all about scamming the Nigerian scammers.  Ok, get back to work!