Thursday, December 28, 2006

Walking the hyena




Once a Brazilian correspondent e-mailed me photographs he'd taken in Nigeria.
Here's one - for more, visit Scamorama.

Then the people who did the cover art for the Gorillaz album "Demon Days" asked to use one of the pics.
It's there, you can see it :) pretty cool.

Then The Disinformation Company came calling. My publisher-to-be.
They wanted to use a pic for a book called NO HOLIDAY: 80 Places You Don't Want to Visit... A Disinformation Travel Guide.

Then they said, have you thought of writing a book about all this?
I had :)

press: interview on the Leonard Lopate Show

My first lengthy sound interview.

Being interviewed by Leonard Lopate is a great interview experience. He knows his stuff, asks good questions and provides a generous time slot. Plus he has a nice relaxing voice.

The Scamorama interview (MP3) is posted at WNYC along with other Lopate interviews which reflect wide-ranging interests and an eminent list of acquaintances. It's flattering to be included.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2006/12/21

I'm getting an education in how to be interviewed.

Previous interviews: five minutes live on the BBC (Up All Night, run by someone with a lovely voice and the gift of making me feel very intelligent), a few print interviews (some involved much repetition, another felt more like a late-night bull session with a friend), and taped radio interviews, to be cut up and used as needed. All interesting, all different in pace and tone.

I'm grateful for these opportunities.

Friday, December 01, 2006

The book



So this is what the book looks like. If you buy it, you can see how gorgeous the cover really is. Try wiping the little hair off the keyboard. Heh heh.

It has been seen in bookstores; it can also be ordered from Amazon et al.
[If it's not on the shelf at your local bookstore, demand indignantly that it be ordered at once, and in bulk!]

press: info today

Syndicated columnist Reid Goldsborough has written an article about Scamorama with a technical slant in InfoToday.

Reid is the author of the book Straight Talk About the Information Superhighway.

press: north adams transcript

John Mitchell of the North Adams Transcript has written a generous and thoughtful article about the Scamorama book:

http://www.thetranscript.com/entertainment/ci_4747390

John is also blogs at Last Visible Dog.

november was cool: book readings in brooklyn

In November I was invited to give two book readings in New York City, both in Brooklyn.

One was at VoxPop, a cozy, bright and friendly little bookstore / cafe / music space a bit south of Prospect Park. The other is Sunny's Bar in Red Hook, a lovely place run by the charming Sunny, where novelist Gabriel Cohen hosts a monthly reading series.

At both venues I spoke for a bit, then invited audience members to join in dramatic readings of correspondences between scammers and people who love to yank their chains. Some material was from the book, some was from the archives.

People enjoy reading out loud. It used to be quite a family and social thing to do. At VoxPop we were graced by the presence of Claire Beckman, artistic director of Brave New World Repertory Theater. An actual actor! But everyone who read was good, and fun was had by all, especially with the story of the prankster who tried to sell a *scammer* the Brooklyn Bridge.

Readings are fun. I'd like to do more, suggestions for venues are welcome. [not Lagos, sorry! although come to think of it, there are Nigerian scambaiters, and they may be hella funny - certainly they'd have the best foundation for stringing a 419er along. Somewhere a Nigerian is probably writing a terrific novel about all of this.]

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Welcome to Scamorama on Blogspot

I run Scamorama and this is the Scamorama blogspot page. Gotta keep up with the Joneses, and the Abachas.

Scamorama is about '419' scambaiters.
The '419' scam is a form of advance fee fraud.
Scambaiters are people who write back to '419' scammers just to yank their chains, waste their time, or as the British say, wind them up.
The resulting correspondence amounts to a literary genre, which is curated at Scamorama.

This scam has been around for centuries in various countries - the current version is going great guns under the management of a certain crowd in and from Nigeria. [They may soon have to give way to experts from Eastern Europe, who are less funny but equally driven.]

The well-known independent publisher, The Disinformation Company invited me to write a book based on the Scamorama web site.

It came out in September of this year.
It's called Scamorama: Turning the Tables on Email Scammers.
You can find it in bookstores, and at Amazon et al.

Disinfo set up a Scamorama page at MySpace. I will be adding to that as well.

For an in-depth introduction, come on over to www.scamorama.com.