Sure, That Sounds Legitimate

And so it is. The damned fools can't take a hint. They can't stop doing what they do. No matter how many times they get no replies, no matter how many times they are ridiculed. They continue to carry on with their infernal purpose. They send us these ridiculous emails promising riches and investments and all sorts of wonderful stuff. They post spam comments that have nothing to do with the subject at hand and only prove they weren't paying attention in the first place. I speak, of course, of the cursed lot we know as homo sapiens spammeritis annoyingus, the internet scammer and spammer. This came through my email recently.

Hello Friend,

My name is Simon Peters, a lawyer and solicitor by profession here in Lome,Togo.

I am writing to you on behalf of my client, a nationality of your country who lived here in Lome, Republic of Togo in West-Africa  when he was alive.

My client died some years back, he left the sum of Us$ 8.5 Million in one of the banks here in Togo, West-Africa, unfortunately he did not leave any WILL nor address of any of his relatives, and the WILL have an open beneficiary.

I would like to present you as his relative, so you can inherit the money he left behind.

Reply me if you are interested in the inheritance money.

Thanks and best regards.

Barr. Simon Peters
Lome, Republic of Togo.

So this has a lot in common with a scam email I've ridiculed recently- in particular, the location, Lome, Republic of Togo. I wonder if the same person has a handful of variants that he sends out under a number of names. Regardless, he bears all the hallmarks of the standard scammer. The overly formal writing, the grammatical mistakes, like capitalizing words that don't need it, and missing out on the fact that it's US when referring to that figure of money (which is totally fictional), not Us. He proposes a scheme in which he passes me off as the heir to his non-existent dead client of his non-existent law practice, so that I can inherit his money. All 8.5 million of it.

Sure, buddy. Right. That's believable. What could possibly go wrong if I were to email this nitwit and say I'm in?

Not much.

Just everything. 

Yeah, I'd be losing the several thousand dollars of administrative fees that this guy would bring up by the second conversation, and he would disappear into the night, like the scumbag he is. Because he's a scammer, sending this to hundreds of thousands of other people in the vain hope that someone will believe it.

Nice try, numbskull. 

I get it, this is who you are, and you're not going to change, and that's fine. I get that. You're stuck in this rut of scamming people for whatever you can get. But I know better, so move along.

Because sooner or later we're going to have to escalate this and send one of these guys after you. To teach you some manners. Or tear you in half, whatever works for them.