Houston man cons Internet scam artists: Fake Texans’ e-mails hooking the hoodwinkers
I haven’t heard from my dear friend Miriam Abacha in awhile now, and this might just explain why. She’s probably been just a wee bit too busy being run in circles by Jeff Noble.
I would imagine that by now we’ve all received pleas for help from various flavors of Nigerian royalty, wealth, or political power, all of whom are in dire need or our assistance in squirreling their ill-gotten gains out of the country. Of course, there’s something in it for us if we help them out, but we’re all familiar with the old maxim, I suppose: If it sounds too good to be true, well, it quite probably is. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Noble can’t have some fun with them in the meantime.
She was “Mrs. Miriam,” the beleaguered widow of a top-level Nigerian official who turned to the Internet to solicit secret help in investing $50 million in the United States. He was “Dan the Car Man,” a boisterous Houston mechanic with a heart of gold.
When she promised $10 million for chivalrous assistance, he offered to change her oil, deflate her tires, top off her fluids and dual out her double tranny manifold carburetor — all in 10 minutes or money back. When Miriam insisted her business proposal was intended only to help her molested children, Dan offered all of them jobs in his garage.
It could have been a business match made in cyber-heaven. It was, of course, nothing but a con artist getting out-conned.
Miriam was an obvious fraud — one of dozens of fictitious characters used by international criminals to separate gullible computer users from their cash. Dan was the brainchild of 27-year-old Houston Web designer Jeff Noble, out to strike a blow for cyber chumps everywhere with his satiric Web site, www.reversescam.com.
Battling Internet come-ons by firing back e-mails from a host of outrageous, stereotypical Texas characters — Beaumont Knitting Guild queen Gertrude Smith, raunchy goat rancher Billy Bob Jones and salt shaker mogul Robert Smith — Noble matches scammers lie for lie. While the humor is sometimes sophomoric and often politically incorrect, Noble usually comes out on top.
Posted on the site are dozens of exchanges between con artists and Noble’s wily crew of misfits.
Of course, Jeff Noble isn’t the first person to ever use the Nigerian 419 scam for his own personal entertainment and edification. He is, however, quite likely the first to ever make a cottage industry out of it.
You go, Jeff. If you can keep the maroons occupied long enough, perhaps that will be fewer spam emails for the rest of us
