At This Time of Holiday Cheer

Posted By: Peter DavidPosted On:

I think it helps to remember those of us less fortunate. Like this unfortunate guy, whose email showed up in my box six times in a row.

Happy christmas to you,how are you doing hope you fine and in perfect order.My names are James Morttey i am 16 yrs old and i am from DR Congo,i came to Ghana after the murder of my parents 2 mouths ago by hired assasin by someone i don’t know,before they got to him in the house he revealed to me that i should come to Ghana with the documents in a small box,if i get a trust worth foreign partner to help me make claim to the fund he deposited in an Escrow account in International Commercial Bank Ghana.The woman whom i am with now cannot read she is not correct and people around call her crazy woman,and she cannot help me in this matter,i am contacting you to help me as my foreign partner so i can get my life back,go to school and have a family that will care for me,i do know what to do that is why i am contacting you to assist me. Thank you.

Poor bášŧárd. Where’s my checkbook…?

PAD

31 comments on “At This Time of Holiday Cheer”

  1. In the interest of full disclosure, I should inform everyone here that I’m the hired assassin who offed the kid’s parents. What can I say? The money was good, and besides, those two šhìŧš had it comin’ to ’em. (They wore white after Labor Day, dammit!)
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    The reason I’m posting this is because the bit about the box is a total LIE. There were no documents in it whatsoever. I mean, I had to travel 300 miles from the dive bar over which I live to that house, for a job that didn’t even pay as well as it should have, I had to layout some serious francs for the guns and ammo to do the job, I spent all day ransacking that house for that box, and when I finally find it, all that’s in it are a few Silly Bandz, a button or two, and some old, beat-up copies of books by Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer. And now this kid is pretending that his old man not only had time to give it to him, but that there was something in it worth sending out spam emails about. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of seeing this gøddámņ emails all over the Net by these Congolese teenagers (Lying Lari, I like to call ’em), who can’t seem to get their šhìŧ straight. It’s like there’s no honor any more in Congolese spammers.
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    Kids.

    1. Luigi did not find anything in the box because I had stolen it from this poor kid’s parents before Luigi did them in.

      Unfortunately, while the documents enclosed are worth millions, I do not have a bank account here in my hometown in Nigeria. So if you send me your credit card and banking information, I will transfer half of these millions of dollars into both your credit card accounts (to reduce balances — who wants to pay high interest rates?) and your bank account.

      You can also marry my beautiful daughter.

      1. Luigi, in his hurry to off the parents (and shed no tears for their demise, if demised they truly be) failed to consider that the Dan Brown book–oh the irony!–was actually part of a devilishly clever encrypted message that included the bank account number, the secret location of stolen gold from the temple of Mutato, and a great chicken salad recipe. Seriously, great.
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        James took the wrong box. The poor sap, he tries hard. that’s what makes it so gøddámņëd funny.
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        Bill, sitting on a beach in Bimini, counting my money and eating chicken salad, bìŧçhëš!

      2. .
        Hah!
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        Enjoy your time on the beach, Mulligan! Spend all the money you have while thinking your big payday is coming. Just know that it ain’t and that I’ve fooled you all!
        .
        Sure, Luigi was a hired gun, James swooped in and stole the (wrong) box out from under his nose and you think you’ve worked out the secret codes in the real box… But they were all fakes to throw you off!
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        I am the mastermind who set all of this into motion. I am the one who originally hired Luigi through a third party knowing full well that he would jump at the bait. It was easy getting him on board. He can barely afford his designer drug habit on the salary that he gets from Wiki.
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        It was then I who hacked into the foreign servers and email systems in Ghana (okay, I had a coworkers 12 year old son do it since I know squat about hacking) to send the email to Peter and the others.
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        It was I who created the dummy boxes to throw people like James off the true money trail.
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        It was I , knowing your overly obsessive love for puzzles and mysteries and you desire to believe that they lead somewhere other than a wasted weekend or a bad film, who created the bogus codes and encrypted messages that lead to nothing more than a chest full of chocolate coins! Seriously, you didn’t notice that the treasure was peeling (and probably melting given the heat) when you ran your grubby hands through it?
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        And it was TUNA SALAD ÐÃMN IT! I drew a fish! My art skills may not be all that great, but they ain’t that bad.
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        Oh, and, of course, it is I , the master manipulator and master of disguise, who is in fact the crazy old woman he was staying with.
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        I knew that you all couldn’t help yourselves. I knew that you would knife each other in the back to get there first and make off with the loot. I knew that you would introduce characters in the last chapter who were never even mentioned in the rest of the book! Wait… Skip that last line. Wrong villainous rant.
        .
        Yes, I knew that all of you could be counted on to dump your life’s savings into that Ghana bank account while attempting to make off with what you saw as easy loot. And now that I have all of your life’s savings safely in my hot little hands…
        .
        It’s still not enough to cover the air fair back home. Uhm… Can anybody spare an extra $13.74 to get me home?

      1. Thanks for the compliment, Peter. I had a feeling that others would pick up what I set up and run with it.
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        Thank you very much, folks, we’ll be here all week!
        .
        😉

      3. I dunno, Tom — Dr. Calamari hasn’t made an appearance yet.
        .
        “The seaweed of crime bears bitter sushi…”

  3. Glad to know the Nigerian Letter lives on. I haven’t seen a good one in a while.

    But my favorite was the one I received from “Arafat’s widow”. That one took nerve and was also fairly clever as these things go.

  5. As a professional writer, what would your advise be to the author of that letter? How could they improve their work to make it a more compelling read?

      5. .
        Robert, just to be clear here since the 😉 may not have been as big of a hint as I had hoped… I was just yanking your chain.
        .
        Remember, I’m the guy who thinks that Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, The Brainiac, Message From Space, Psychomania, Shock Treatment, The Crawling Eye and Eegah amongst others are great films and I still consider Menace Under Marswood to be one of the great underrated gems of science fiction adventure literature.
        .
        Barring your saying that you thought that Uwe Boll was a great and gifted filmmaker who showed signs of genius in his craft or declaring a love of vampires that “sparkle” in sunlight… I ain’t gonna be seriously bust your chops over your choice of entertainment pastimes.

    2. Since you asked Robert (and since I started that ball rolling), he can construct a interesting puzzle to be solved based on historical trivia (which itself is often incorrect). Other than that, IMO, he can’t write for šhìŧ.
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      Between the arrogant manner in which he claims that so much in his books is true, his obsession with treating his novels as academic lectures (even when it means grinding the narrative to a screeching halt to have characters dump loads of trivia on them that has nothing to do with advancing the story), and characters that are so thin that you can actually see the edge of the cardboard if you view them at the right angle (Pretty pathetic that he thinks of Robert Langdon as the kind of person he’d like to be, given that Langdon is a stuffy milquetoast intellectual whose most salient traits are swimming, a touch of claustrophobia, a tweed sweater and a Mickey Mouse watch), Dan Brown is essentially the Ed Wood of novelists.
      .
      That’s just me. If you think he’s a well-rounded good writer, then to each his own.

  6. What the posters before me who have actually dealt with “the documents” have failed to notice in their haste is that NONE of those papers bear the royal seal(s) or watermarks!
    That is because I, in my infinite wisdom, switched the REAL documents for forgeries long ago, and as soon as I reestablish contact with that Nigerian Prince who first e-mailed me about all of this; I shall be rich, RICH beyond my wildest dreams I tell you! *bwa-ha-ha!*
    And if you believe that, I have some nice swampland in Arizona to sell dirt cheap. 😉

  8. I miss the guy who once sent me something similar. His handle was, I believe Desmond 22….

  11. Teenage kid. Exotic, impoverished country. Hired assassins. A yearning for family.

    If you just added the sentence “That’s about when my mutant power first manifested.” somewhere around the middle, it would fit perfectly as the backstory for a new X-Men character. :p

    1. Or it could be the next recruit in the Batman Inc storyline. Haven’t read it but I heard of it and that kid might fit the bill as a new Batman! 🙂

    2. Actually come to think of it, this isn’t that far removed from Spider-Man’s back story, given that his parents were spies killed by the 1950s Red Skull imposter, and that the Burglar was after a secret stash of money in May and Ben’s place.

  12. What Luigi has failed to account for is that there is no way he could be the killer since he failed to call attention to an obvious disfigurement when taking credit for the assassination. Everyone knows that all murderers are missing an arm or have an extra finger that marks them as different.
    He should have much better sense than to claim credit for something he obviously is ill-equipped to accomplish, since everyone knows that Morttey is an anglicized version of the name… MONTOYA!

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