Esteemed Compliments

Mr. Emmanuel Akwasi, Branch Manager of the International Commercial Bank Takoradi Branch in Ghana, wrote me today to let me know of yet another of what seems to be a very unfortunate series of circumstances. As a family man, I was immediately struck by the fact that he mentioned that he was happily married with three children twice in as many paragraphs, but then our paths began to diverge. He spun a tale of twelve and a half million dollars and offered me a chance to be part of some illicit scheme to share in part of this windfall. Sure, a little extra cash around the holidays would be a welcome relief, but all of this international intrigue leaves me just a little cold. What if I had to travel to Ghana to pick up this wad of bills? I hate to travel and dealing with strangers always makes me nervous. Still, just one percent of all that money would drop one hundred thousand dollars into my account. So very tempting.
But in real life, I just crushed it into the spam file and deleted it with the offers for natural enhancement and the opportunity to meet attractive Russian women. Odd how those two things tend to show up in the same e-mail flurry. Odd, again, that this particular ruse continues to swirl about Al Gore's Internet years after they first appeared years ago. Like info-mercials for the Shake Weight, they seem to linger. Somebody must buy this stuff. Not me.
My wife, on the other hand, just might. To be fair, she is a pretty savvy consumer and is the one who introduced me to Snopes.com way back when I was new to the cyber jungles myself. Still, when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Unless it's happening to you. She was trying to sell a dresser set that my son has long since outgrown, and having little to no success at various garage and rummage sales, decided to take her chances online.
That's when the creeps came out. One in particular was very excited and pleased to offer her a chance to sell her merchandise, and in a very awkwardly written reply, this potential buyer began to spin a tale of woe and confusion that made the time and effort my wife was putting into the transaction seem ridiculous. Several different attempts were made to send a check, but never for the purchase price alone. She was asked to deposit the funds, then remit the difference back to a third party. Not the party of the first part, since they had recently experienced what was described as "a very fatal accident."
Somewhere along the line, I caught wind of all of this, and attempted in my husbandly way to talk her down out of her tree. After a few days of negotiation, I began to understand that my wife understood the scam, and was happily playing along, without the expectation of making a penny off the experience. The dressers are still in our basement, and my wife has had an amusing week or two dangling herself in front of the cyberscum as a potential victim, knowing that at any moment she could simply hit delete and get on with her life. That's not how she wanted to play it. She loves to travel. And if you've got a big check that needs to be cashed, she's open to negotiation.