The con-mail and the fishy smell - The glittering diamonds of dumbness

A long mail with the title “Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Please do it - Microsoft Paying you - Not Fake” jerked me out of my unbreakable inner calm and rudely wakened me to a surprise revelation of the basic dumbness of even the so-called educated intelligent people. This is the dumbness that flows out of the fountainhead of greed that chunks out the basic logic and reasoning out of the people and makes them run towards even any remote hazy unjustified promise of easy money.

The basic mail says
“Dear Friends,
Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates is sharing his fortune. If you ignore this you will repent later. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test..

When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period.

For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two week! s, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.”

There is no name of details of the sender or other details but there are some cut-out portions of some people (with no real contact details again except some hazy sketches of company names like Cognizant-TCS-Trident Hilton and a couple of designations like Front Office manager, no wonder, and dates like 15th August, 2005 -31st August, 2005 and 09/02/2005 and January 09, 2007). They have all said that they have got $10002 or $34271 or $9386 or $12545 or $30000 or $12121 etc.

Do I need to say more ? Since 19997, when I first got my internet access in office, I am seeing these kind of mails, usually sent by pranksters out to get a high or just with the good intent of jamming the network. Now the network is too big to be affected but the fun is still there (example are the mails with a picture of Jesus or Ganesh saying you should send it to so many people to get a lot of luck etc. and this and that will happen if you don’t send it etc. etc.). They sometimes play on your religiousness or emotion and sometimes with your greed. The result is that I am seeing many ids associated with the mail senders and many of the recipients are bulk ids (many also associated with the pharma co. raptakos). The height is that this has been forwarded to me by an ex-classmate of mine in IIM-C, a guy who used to do well in class, was good in strategy and was nicknamed “Professor” by us (naming credit to this poor guy). Don’t know if I should write to prof. Ranjan Das to strip him his diploma.

For quite some time I am after the question why and how do we act so dumb that we do not see the obvious? This is one of the case study. The next question is how many sympathy drinks can you get out of, "Well, this mail said I have own a big lottery and asked for my details and with login and password, so I gave it to them"? There's no epic story here, no melodrama, no classic twists and turns.

The con-men are everywhere, some of them are just pranksters, rest are con about whom I have recently written. In any case, the first step would always be to gain your confidence - the "con" in "con man" and to show you the sunrise of a few million dollars in the lottery you own. Some will brazenly ask for your personal details, the innocent ones at first and then the more private ones in a next step. Others will be more tacit and will politely ask if you are willing to accept the prize. They will try to gain your trust and even become your friend through an elaborate set of lies, set like a stepped garden and let you be in on the lifetime chance, something that your friends will beat you if you let it go by, Then finally, with flair and grace, they will turn the knife, rip the heart out and depart, with your money and your trust on mankind.

I repeat - You can cheat anyone, but con only a greedy man.