“URGENT: PLEASE OPEN TO CLAIM YOUR PRISE!!!” Delete emails like that several times a day without even opening them? It seems almost no one’s inbox is impervious to shameless spam email, asking its recipient to save an African heiress from poverty, invest in a surefire money-making scheme, or claim lottery money already won.
Diana Grove decided to write back. In her new book, Dot.Conned: The Outrageously Funny, 100 Percent True Accounts of Conning Internet Con Men, Grove invents a dozen characters, all with ridiculous pictures and detailed back stories, who innocently reply to e-mails with titles like “NICE JOB VACANCY .”
Grove’s characters, including a former child star, a “metaphysical accountant,” a Russian spy and an Albino prophet, pour their hearts and life stories into these emails but dance around giving out any useful, identity-theft-worthy information. Grove’s first con went on for months, and afterward, she says, “I decided to open all of my spam email and see just how far I could take things. It became addictive. It truly was comedic improv with real-life bad guys.”
The humor lies in the scammers’ responses to Grove’s ever- weirder scam-ees; what begins as asking for help in badly translated English turns into a typo-riddled, all-caps demand to stop wasting time and send the money already. “I would create such bizarre characters and put them in such wild scenarios I thought for sure the con men would be tipped off by something like a phony marriage certificate, a character dressed like Edgar Winter holding a crystal ball, or a photo of a severed foot,” Grove says. “But it never failed; they always got back to me. I guess they are as gullible as their victims. They so badly wanted to believe I would cave into their scam and give them money. Although my goal was to drive the con men so crazy they snapped, I really grew to like them. They were such hard workers; they always worked on the weekends and holidays. I could rely on them to be there in my inbox in the morning. Sure, they were trying to con me out of my money, but they were always trying to con me out of my money, and there’s a lot of comfort in consistency.”
