This year, popular blog Mashable.com launched a new segment called ‘Scamalot’ that sees comedian James Veitch reply to a selection of the hordes of scam emails he receives in his inbox each week.
The practise of replying to scam emails with the intention of wasting the scammers time – and often making them look rather silly in the process – is known as scambaiting. It’s a pastime that many an Internet user enjoys, though it is recommended to stick to some important rules if you do want to get involved.
The justification of scambaiting is that the more time a scammer wastes on you, the less time they’ll be scamming a genuine victim out of their savings.
For the first episode in the new Scamalot segment, James Veitch responds to an email from a man named Solomon who was offering a very unique “financial opportunity”.
From there began a bizarre journey spanning many weeks where Veitch tried to push the boundaries of what he could get away with, including making Solomon refer to him only as KitKat. We won’t go into too much detail because Veitch discussed the experience in a TED talk which you can watch below.
The final response from Solomon is very amusing indeed!
