Anyone with an email address will have received those strange emails…emails that contain scams such as unclaimed inheritances, crazy business offers, or friends who have somehow been stuck in a foreign country and need your help….and all involving sending money urgently!

As I delete these emails without even reading them, a thought has occurred to me…what would happen if I did reply to one of these emails?

Well, someone has….and written a book about it!

Comedian, Jame Veitch, spent some months responding to scam emails, with often bizarre yet hilarious results.

Not often I laugh out loud when reading a book, but Dot.Con is doozy!

DotCon
It is an easy read…in fact, I finished it all in one sitting, but sometimes you just have to shake your head at how gullible the scammers must think we are.

Well, I guess they must get successful at extracting money, otherwise why do it?

But the funniest bits are when the scammer realize they are being scammed…the outrage!

Veitch even gives a glossary of the types of scams he came across, and each email is categorised…scarily, most of them managed to cover five different types in one online conversation.

My favourite discourse was the one about the snail farm…yes, really…followed by the one called The Blurb…Vietch actually got a “marooned friend” scammer to write a blurb for a fictional book.

Oh, and don’t forget 59 year old John Kelly, who had cancer of the “lever”…sounds painful.

Dot.Con has now satisfied my curiosity of what would happen if I took on a scammer using their own tactics.

It’s actually quite tempting now I have seen how much fun it could be…but I think I will leave it to the expert!

Dot.Con by James Veitch can be found at good bookstores and online.

Please note: this is not a sponsored post! My opinions are, as always, totally my own!