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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Spamming for lions, July 18, 2008
This review is from: Delete This at Your Peril: One Man's Hilarious Exchanges with Internet Spammers (Hardcover)
Every day
Jamming your In-Box
Is SPAM
This book
Is about one man
Who replied
Watch Bob
Spam the Spammers
For laughs
The paragraphs below use some of Bob's examples to give the reader a sense of this book, which is really quite clever if you like this sort of thing.
[Warning: Replying to spammers can cause spam mail to increase exponentially]
Greetings to you in the name of the Most High.
A business acquaintance of mine visited your fine country of Scotland recently and recommended you as a fine and honorable gentleman who can be entrusted with a matter of the highest confidentiality and importance.
He has assured me that you are an expert in business and trade, and that you may have purchased already four golden lions, two leopards and an alligator from the only son of His Excellency King Arawi of Togo. I hope that they are thriving and bringing you much joy.
First, I will introduce myself. I am a former citizen of a Soviet country, but through good fortune and most reputable mail order organization I was able to get married to a good man from Nigeria, who owns both a textile company and a pottery barn. I also obtained for myself a PhD doctorate in Business and Finance through correspondence with major unaccredited university in the United American States.
I am sad to say that my husband is now late due to assassination by his competitors, and I am left alone with his business affairs to handle. I will also tell you that due to his relatives in the government, my husband has been able to save a lot of money which is in an account in my name, and I trust you to keep this information in confidence. My friend Bob, I am a beautiful woman of only 25 years, and I am unable to do business here with the men in Nigeria. My late husband's lawyer cannot be trusted with such matters, and I am looking to you to help me transfer 32 million Sterling pounds to Scotland, where I understand you own a Cheeseburger Business and an African Café.
I would like for us to get better acquainted and maybe you would like to become my husband. I can cook genuine African dishes, especially yam potage, Isi Ewu and Afang soup, which I am sure your customers will enjoy. We can achieve many great things together, you and I.
My dear Bob, I am so excited about this venture between us that I can hardly wait for your soonest reply. Please also send me your photo and the name of your bank and account number so I can begin preparing to transfer the money.
Modesta Spamminovitch-Upayme
This is a quick and funny read, and heartily recommended to anyone who has e-mail.
Amanda Richards, July 19, 2008
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
B OBSERVANT, April 11, 2008
This review is from: Delete This at Your Peril: One Man's Hilarious Exchanges with Internet Spammers (Hardcover)
Anyone who uses the internet at all has to be familiar with unsolicited junk email, commonly known as Spam. Some spams are also scams. In particular there is a regular traffic, known in America as Phishing, in efforts to obtain banking and credit-card details from the unwary. Neil Forsyth, recently the author of a perceptive and sympathetic study (Other People's Money) of the young Scottish credit-card fraudster Elliot Castro, now turns his attention to the phishers.
This time he comes in from a different angle. He categorises the main forms of phishy correspondence - vast Nigerian giveaways, bogus Russian brides, local agents and franchisees solicited for non-existent businesses - but this time he entertains us with his replies to the phishers, pretending to hide behind the persona of a certain Bob Servant (?geddit?). For me at least, a lot of the interest and fascination of the exchanges was in wondering how many of them were real and how many invented or enhanced for the purpose of making a book out of them. I could have asked Neil, but whether or not he would have told me I decided that would have been unfair and so I have refrained. Obviously, the more of these messages that are genuine the better the whole joke is. I like to think that at the very least all the original emails received from the various would-be hoaxers are as they sent them.
One has to wonder what success-rate these hoaxes enjoy. Some are in such bad English that surely they must raise the suspicions of all but the most trusting, gullible and inexperienced. Others look a bit more professional, but are open to perfectly simple and obvious responses - e.g. after receiving several requests from a firm in Australia to send them £10 to cover the cost of their sending me some enormous sum I finally wrote back suggesting that they deduct their £10 from the said fortune, and I imagine that anyone else who would have so much as taken the trouble to reply at all would have replied in the same terms. What Neil Forsyth - sorry, Bob Servant - has done is to keep stringing them along and see how much of their time he can waste, and it really does read as if once the phishers have got a bite (or think they have) they can be pretty gullible themselves, to judge by the patience they show in the face of some rather obvious kidding and stalling.
No two of us have the same sense of humour, and I don't know whether this book will appeal to yours. To me it's not so much rolling-in-the-aisles stuff as an intriguing mixture of very clever and ingenious on the one hand and completely barefaced micky-taking on the other. Searching for a comparison, the one that sprang to my mind unbidden was the late Humphry [sic] Berkeley's spoof correspondence from H Rochester Sneath, headmaster of the nonexistent Petworth School, to various public school heads. This might seem an odd parallel as Berkeley was the English of the English and Bob Servant operates from the dour Scottish fastness of Broughty Ferry, but I think that if you know and enjoy Berkeley's effort you will likely enjoy Bob's too. If you do not know, and consequently cannot enjoy, Berkeley's fake correspondence with real-life stooges you can find it in The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose.
This collection could be sold as having a social purpose in teaching the rest of us how to deal with pests like these, but Neil Forsyth does not try to sell it in these terms so neither shall I. I also wonder whether it may do for Broughty Ferry what the TV series Tutti Frutti did for Buckie in terms of publicity. If so, I trust that this fine community will reward the author with e-vouchers exchangeable in its numerous bars.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most laugh-out-loud hilarious little book I've ever read, June 15, 2008
This review is from: Delete This at Your Peril: One Man's Hilarious Exchanges with Internet Spammers (Hardcover)
Have you ever been tempted to respond to any of the ridiculous scam messages that flood your inbox on a daily basis, just to see what kind of response you get back or to see how far you can take the discussion before blowing the spammer off? Well, one man has taken that idea and flat-out run with it, and you won't believe the results. If ever there were a true character on this earth, it has to be "Bob Godzilla Servant," former window cleaner (until some gypsies stole his ladders, but don't get him started on that again), veteran of Dundee's Infamous Cheeseburger Wars of 1988-89, all-around man about town, gifted tall tale teller, and now a hero for the twenty-first century. Not only can he vanquish spammers with one hand tied behind his back, he's even capable of leaving at least one of them laughing about the whole thing.
"Bob Servant" is unique, which makes it impossible for me to communicate just how funny this book is. He is as much in his element in front of a keyboard as he is down at the local pub regaling anyone and everyone with his stories, schemes, and ideas. There's just no way I could adequately describe the likes of "Bob's" best mates Frank the Plank, Chappy Williams, and Tommy Peanuts, let alone "Bob" himself, to you here, nor could I even begin to do justice to the halcyon days when "Bob" dominated the cheeseburger van market. Even if I could, it wouldn't be right for me to do so. You are in good hands with journalist Neil Forsyth, who tells you everything you need to know (and then some) about his good friend "Bob's" extraordinary life and times.
Fittingly, the fun begins with the original standard bearer of spam, the old 419 (better known as the "Nigerian" scam). In this case, it's the son of a dead tribal king in Togo seeking help transferring a fortune from his home country into an American bank. "Bob" wants more than the standard cut and ends up getting his African friend promising to deliver talking lions as payment. The guy who offers him a wonderful textile distribution opportunity ends up advising "Bob" on the legal problems he faces after kidnapping his postman. Then he's wooing his new Russian wife-to-be in his own unique way (it involves an ostrich), turning another 409 scammer into the primary advisor to the ultra-realistic African restaurant he plans to open, starting an online love affair (pretending to be a woman, of course) with the son of a dead general in Sierra Leone, etc. There are eight sets of genuine email correspondence in all, each one of them as hilarious as the next.
Frankly, I can't even begin to describe just how entertaining every single page of this book is. "Bob Servant" is the best character to come along in a long, long time, and Delete This At Your Peril is the funniest book I've read since I discovered The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf many years ago. Heck, this might actually be the funniest book I've ever read, period. You won't just enjoy reading this book; you'll want to tell your co-workers about it, buy it as a gift for friends, and light a candle in hopes that "Bob Servant" will someday regale us with more stories or - even better - pen an autobiography of his exceptional life.
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