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Sudanese Stooges Want your Money!

Most of the spam e-mail I receive these days at my work address appears to use a common phony-sender-name generating algorithm: throw a bunch of common english first and last names into a pair of lookup tables, add some random names and words that appear to sound like names to the 15-year-old Nigerian hackers of the world, sprinkle in a random middle initial (with a simulated coin toss to decide whether the phony name should get a middle initial or not), and presto! A bogus-sounding sender name anyone except those blinded by greed, voyeurism, desperation to lose weight or to enlarge any of the various body parts in which they apparently carry their miniscule self-esteem, or in the throes of any of an unlimited variety of bizarre sexual fetishes - in other words, anyone but the people susceptible to such e-mail scams and solicitations - can spot from a mile away.

But sometimes even the best fake-name-generating scheme can go awry, as is evidenced by the following screenshot of my mail program's Junk Mail box. Among the aforementioned typical fake-name scammery from close personal friends of mine like Advising B. Purposing, Amelia Herring, Stoutness H. Bloodying and Emeralds C. Westinghouse, and offering up the usual array of microcap stocks guaranteed to devastate your investment portfolio, phishing scams disguised as account notices from various banks, Asian panty-porn gibberish and messages whose appeal appears to lie in the sheer bizarreness of their subject lines ("should MANUAL live JARED" is actually an e-mail about a penny-stock scam) we see one from "Sudanese H. Stooges":

Doubtless a worthwhile investment opportunity brought to my attention by my good friends Larry, Curly, Omar and Habib, a.k.a. "The Shemp of the Sudan." (He got that nickname because everytime he's late for Friday afternoon prayers - which he often is - he comes running in the side door of the mosque, trying to take off his sandals while he's still running, and making this really funny "nyaaaaa-ahhh" noise - it's frickin' hilarious, all praise be unto Allah the most merciful and humorous.) As soon as I get my share of the $19.5 million left in a Swiss Bank account by that ex-Ugandan military minister whose cancer-stricken widow was so kind as to write to me about her plight, I'm gonna buy enough sub-Saharan fat-blasting pills for the entire U.S. midwest.

http://hogranch.com/mayer/sudan.html -- Last Revised: 13 Jun 2006
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