posted on Tuesday, July 13th 2010 5:37 pm | ||||||||||||||
 After switching to a Mac recently, I decided to put my old laptop up for sale to help recoup a little of the Mac cost. I received an email almost immediately from a girl named Rebecca and we had this email exchange…
After letting Becca (I can call her that cause we’re tight) know my PayPal email address, she immediately sent me the payment. But, as I expected, this was a Nigerian scam. The payment emailed looked very real, although the color scheme was a little off. Just to be sure, I checked my PayPal account to make sure there really wasn’t an extra $500 in it. There wasn’t. My dreams of receiving a bonus $100 for my old laptop were crushed.
The next day, I found an email from the FBI waiting for me. Except that it was another very obviously fake email.
Stuff like this puts me on the side of the Nigerian scammers. If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, the absence of a payment in their account, fake emails from PayPal’s FBI department or just Nigerians in general, then they deserve to have their money taken from them. If I hadn’t noticed this was a scam already, then this email would have let me know. I couldn’t believe they’d try to draw attention to themselves like this when a person otherwise might have gone ahead and mailed the laptop out. I also got another email from Rebecca, accusing me of being a scammer.
At some point during this exchange, someone gave me the idea to mail them a fake laptop for my fake payment. It seemed only fair. I think it was Angela that came up with this, but it’s been so long (over a month!) that I don’t remember. Instead of doing it myself, I told my kids all about Nigerian scammers and asked if they would make me a fake laptop to mail to this guy. Er, I mean girl, because I’m sure she wasn’t lying to me about that. I cut out pieces of cardboard, using my real laptop to make them the right size. Then Emily and Payton began drawing a laptop on the pieces. Emily quickly got bored with it, but Payton finished it all up, even copying the vents and screw holes on the bottom.    The last picture shows the top of the closed cardboard laptop. For hinges we used black electrical tape. It was Payton’s idea to make the screen show the Google homepage, but I had him write “Nigerian scammers” into the search box. I shipped it the next morning at the cost of around $9.00, which almost made me feel bad about all the extra money she sent me for shipping. On the customs form, I put the value at $500 and the description said “cardboard art.” I’m not completely sure of this, but I think Nigerians have to pay a small percentage of the value to customs, so putting a high price on the customs form hopefully cost them a little money. Although the post office promised me that it would arrive in about 10 days, I didn’t hear back from Becca until this morning. As I was eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, she begins messaging me. 9:25 AM: rebecca: you are stupid for what you did Soon after that chat, she tried to voice chat with me on Google, but I couldn’t do that since I was on the phone. I’ve tried talking to her a few more times, but she refuses to answer me now. 3:30 PM: me: sorry i can’t voice chat with you. i don’t have a microphone So that’s about it. Tee hee! Interesting that she said she has a boss. Guess she’s just a minion that does the scamming since she’s so good with her people skills and it gets sent to the boss. Kind of like a pimp/ho relationship. I’ll keep trying to chat with her and append anything else that happens to this post, but I doubt she’ll say anything more to me. | ||||||||||||||
- 82 Commentsposted on Friday, June 12th 2009 9:31 am |
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Back in the 1980′s I was channel surfing and came across a movie on cable that was just starting called Troll. It was pretty bizarre and was about this Troll who was systematically taking over each unit of an apartment building in an attempt to rule the world. Something reminded me of it recently so I put it in my Netflix queue and the kids and I watched it. And it turned out the main character’s name was a boy named Harry Potter. Not only was his name Harry Potter, but his name was stated quite clearly many times throughout the movie as he battled trolls and talking plants and befriended a witch that lived upstairs from him. So I decided to throw a little more confusion into the world by editing together all of those parts into a small collection of clips and put them on YouTube, claiming that it’s common knowledge that J.K Rowling based her Harry Potter books off of the original Harry Potter movie from the 1980′s. Here’s the result: I blew 2 or 3 hours on this last night, just to hopefully confuse a few people before YouTube yanks it down for copyright violations. I’m truly a dedicated jerk! If you’re too lazy to read the description I put on YouTube for it, here it is: I caught this on TV a few weeks ago and decided to Tivo it. I never realized that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books were based on an early 1980′s movie by the same name. The story is quite different, taking place in an apartment building called Hogwarts. Harry is trained in magic by a neighbor lady named Eunice McGonagall. Harry’s parents are actually alive in this one and Harry’s father is named Harry too. His father went to a university called Gryffindor and you can see Gryffindor’s logo stamped on this ratty old hat he wears throughout the movie. (Notice he wears Gryffindor colors throughout the whole movie too.) Harry also has a sister who gets kidnapped by Voldemort. Voldemort is this giant muppet who he battles in the end. Pretty interesting to watch and see what the original vision of the Harry Potter universe looked like! Look for it on cable TV, because it appears that it’s never been on DVD and the VHS is out of print. |
posted on Thursday, June 11th 2009 10:00 pm |
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A few months ago I re-enabled the “catchall” on the phonelosers.org email, meaning that I get all email addressed to anything at phonelosers.org. So email bradcarterisabigretard@phonelosers.org and I get it. I forget why I did that, but since then I’ve started getting over 3,000 spam emails a day. Luckily Gmail rules at filtering spam and very few of them end up in my in box. (The spam folder currently has 27,532 messages in it.) But this one came earlier this week, into my in box, and made me laugh:  Looks like someone forgot to fill in all the important fields in their spamming script before sending it to billions of people. I submitted it to The Fail Blog, which is why it’s got the big FAIL on there. But the weird thing is the insane amount of WATCH spam that I get. I bet 1/4th of my spam is for watches. Like, those metal and leather things people wore on their wrists back in the dark ages before cell phones. Check out these weird subject lines and emails though: Our watches are popular all over the world. Precious watches that look elegant and expensive are actually very cheap. No , this is not a dream, this is replica watches. Order yours today and it will reach your place in no time. Your watch will be delivered to any destination. What can be better than fast and secure shipment of elegant designer watches? Maybe just an extremely low price of these watches. For a few hundred dollars you can buy as many watches as you want. Check out Bling Bling watches Only limited to 1000 pieces worldwide, they are expected to sell out within a month. Our stylish watches are priceless but not pricy. Being elegant and trendy takes too much time and money but we know how to help you. First, you save your time by ordering online, second, you save your money by buying replica watches that are identical to the brand ones. Very lovely watches at very lovely prices. The top quality and low price of our watches attracts customers from all over the world. So no matter where you live you can be a happy owner of such a timepiece as we ship them worldwide. Watch the prices drop for that cool watch. Today is a great time to think about getting a watch. No, spammer, 1997 was a time to think about getting a watch! I think the last time I wore a watch was 1999. I had one of those phone book watches that could sync to my computer by just looking at the flashing computer screen. It was cool. IN 1999! Sorry, watch wearers. I’m not actually that anti-watch. I do think watches are cool and look nice but I’m just not that stylish and I can’t imagine blowing money on a thing that does what my cell phone already does since that goes everywhere with me. The spam is just weird though. I’m used to business opportunity spam and “your rich Nigerian uncle died” spam and magic hair growing potion spam and this spam I have here that says, Your manhood will come back to you like a boomerang. But watch spam? That’s just strange. Do any of you get watch spam? |
posted on Wednesday, January 21st 2009 8:01 pm |
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Today I got featured on The Daily Flip Show for returning my Flip video camera to Target. I’m a fan of their show on YouTube. Check it out at thedailyflipshow.com or at www.youtube.com/TheDailyFlipShow. In other YouTube news, every single one of Richard Cardo’s investigative videos have disappeared. Either they all got taken down due to complaints or he hid them from the public to make them stop getting taken down. Also, I think I got Richard grounded from playing investigator today when I called his wife and yelled at her over this whole thing. And in even more YouTube news, Shay Carl is awesome and so is his Shaytards channel. Watch his Turkey Bowling in Wal-Mart video first. Him and his wife are hilarious. |
posted on Monday, November 10th 2008 12:28 am |
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A few weeks ago while on a hike with the kids and a few others from the hiking group, I met a guy who was involved with an area Geocaching group so I joined it a few days later. Turns out, these people pull occasional flash mobs in Albany and Corvallis with a surprisingly large turnout. On Saturday morning, me, Payton and Spessa’s kids drove to Target to cheer for shoppers coming to the doors, as if they were winning a race. They had a finish line banner for them to break through and there were a few signs that people were holding. I was going to make some posterboard signs, but instead I decided to whip up these buttons to hand out to the winners:  Here’s a picture of the flash mob crowd several minutes before the event started:  This is us, lined up on either sides of the doors, waiting for the next victim:  And here’s a father, running towards the finish line with his son in his hands, thankfully not tripping and falling on the way:  I managed to get a parking spot close to Target so I could point my camera out the window of my car as the event happened. I also tuned my scanner to Target’s frequencies, hoping to hear employees talking about us, but I only heard one thing which I think was related to us and it wasn’t that hilarious. I had a digital recorder with me to record the sound up close. Even though I told the other guy with the camera that I was videotaping from the back of my car, which I pointed out to him, he decided to stand directly in front of my window for most of the flash mob, rendering my already spotty video even crappier. If I’d known there would be such a large turnout (at least 40 people) for this event, I would have just held my camera with me since I’d probably be unnoticed in the middle of the crowd. I was only expecting maybe a dozen of us to show up. Here’s my video: Everyone had a really great time with this. Most of the customers entering the store seemed to think it was hilarious. A lot of them ran through the crowd, reveling in the cheers, raising their arms in victory and breaking through our finish line. Some took pictures. Others were too shy to deal with large crowds screaming at them, so they went to the side of us instead. I was really hoping for some conflict with mall security, Target managers and/or the police. Especially the security guy that works at Target who doubles as their floor sweeper. I would have been thrilled to have been asked to leave by any of those people. But only the Target manager came out near the beginning, asking who was in charge and what we were doing. I told her corporate said it was okay, but she ignored me. After a couple minutes of questioning us, she smiled as she ran through the finish line and back into Target as we all cheered for her. For the rest of the event, quite a few Target employees gathered at the doors to watch us from inside. Fifteen minutes later, we quit on our own. It’s too bad we couldn’t have continued for another 15 minutes, but I guess the organizers wanted to keep it short to lessen the chance of us getting on everyone’s nerves and/or getting thrown off the premises. It was a great time and I can’t wait for the next one. 11/11/2008 EDIT: A picture of the mob was in yesterday’s newspaper with a short paragraph about the event. This seems counterproductive to a flash mob. Isn’t the point to weird people out without them ever knowing who you are? Here’s the picture, click it to enlarge:  11/13/2008 EDIT: PabloMac uploaded his video and it has considerably less ass in it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whTkx-63AeM Later that day, the Spessas and I took the kids to the Wunderland, which is a nickle arcade in Salem. They left this afternoon, and I took Emily and Payton to Springfield with me since I needed to visit Best Buy. While we were there we saw Madagascar at the theater. It’s a movie I didn’t necessarily want to see, but I still enjoyed it a lot. On the way out of Best Buy, the security alarm went off. I did what I always do in this situation – I yelled to the kids, “RUN!!!” and I bolted out the door. I was hoping for a chase, but it never happens. The only place I’ve ever been chased was at Wal-Mart where the old lady at the door walked after me (running would have been too strenuous on her) saying, “Sir? Sir? Please come back!” (By the way, I wasn’t shoplifting at Best Buy. They just forgot to deactivate my tag since I bought it from the return desk.) On Friday afternoon I came home and decided to check my mailbox which is out on the sidewalk. I rarely check it since all my mail goes to my PO Box, and it was filled with a huge pile of junk mail as usual. As I was opening the box I spotted 4 young men in suits getting out of their car. Mormons! I had one of those movie moments where I’m frantically trying to get the key into the lock to escape the impending conversation. I wasn’t quick enough, though. As I pulled my junk mail out one of them walks up and cheerfully says, “Hi there!” “Hey.” “That’s sure a lot of mail you’ve got there!” “Yep.” “How are you doing today?” “I really don’t want to talk to you. Bye!” “Do you know of anyone who might need help from us?” he asked as I turned to leave. I quickly walk back to my house. As I shut my door I turn to notice that they didn’t see which apartment I went into. A minute later I watch as two of them begin knocking on every door in the complex. The other two, I assume, went into the other neighborhood. So I did what any other normal person would do. I took off my pants, put on the weirdest pair of boxers I own (red ants all over them) and grabbed my video camera. When they knocked I ran down the stairs, quickly shoved my cat into a closet to keep him from running out the door, flung open the door and screamed, “I am the true lord of the dance! No matter what those idiots at work say!” and then I slammed the door on them. I videotaped it all, of course, and you can click here to see the video. It’s hard to see their expressions in the YouTube video, so here’s a frame capture from the DV version.  I’ll leave it up to the viewers to decide what emotion the one on the right is feeling. I like to think terror, but it’s probably more like WTF. WTF is an emotion, right? I went upstairs to my open window afterwards and listened to them for several minutes while they giggled about me. I was surprised to hear one of them repeat what I said to them verbatim. I wonder if they visited any of my other neighbors afterwards and asked them about “the weird guy.” If you’re wondering why I shouted what I did, you should listen to this song, especially around the 30 second mark. Well, I guess that doesn’t explain why really, but at least you know what the reference is from. |
posted on Sunday, March 9th 2008 11:07 pm |
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Today I failed at sleeping in. I woke around 8 and got up around 9. But since it’s daylight savings I technically woke at 9 and got up at 10. Bought a Pepsi from 7-Eleven to try and wake myself up (My first Pepsi of the year, I think). Watched most of T-2, then put together this Mildred Monday song for the rest of the evening. I wrote that in 1997 and I’ve been meaning to do that ever since then. It’s not done – the sound levels are all wacky. Geez, where did my day go? I didn’t start the song thing until 5 or 6. I must have fallen asleep at some point. I didn’t do anything today. What’s up with haikus? I hate haikus and anyone who writes them. No really, what’s so clever about them? I just read a history of haikus hoping for a little understanding, but I still don’t get it. And I don’t understand why they’re so common in America. Nobody should like them, because they’re dumb. |
posted on Sunday, January 6th 2008 10:26 pm |
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Hey, MatthewT, thanks a lot for telling me about the Violent Acres blog. After reading a couple dozen posts from the RSS feed, I loved them so much that I went to the beginning of her entries (October 2006) and started reading them all. So far I’m up to April 1st, 2007 and I should be caught up by the end of this week. It’s by far my favorite new blog. To anyone who hasn’t – go read Violent Acres! |
posted on Saturday, December 29th 2007 2:07 pm |
 A couple weeks ago, blog after blog began featuring these stickers from evilmadscience.com that read “Now Slower and with More Bugs!” I ordered a set of 10 and they arrived in the mail a few days later. The obvious thing to do with these stickers is slap them on copies of Windows Vista. A few blogs have shown people sticking it on their own copies of Vista, but so far I haven’t seen anyone put them on software in stores. So I stopped by Target today and stuck a few on some Microsoft products.  I accidentally put one on upsidedown since I was trying to be all stealthy about it.  You can order these stickers from evilmadscience.com. UPDATE @ 4:45PM: I was out again today and stickered some more products. What was it, you ask? Apple software? Intuit? Linux? Nope, just some grocery items at Albertsons…   As I was snapping a picture of the Tampax (with the flash on) a girl walked by me with her cart. I’m sure she saw the flash and probably wondered why I would be taking pictures of tampons. A minute later she was blocking the isle and I was just kind of hanging out, waiting for her to move. She looked over at me and said sorry. I told her it was no problem, I wasn’t in a hurry and was just browsing. In the tampon isle. I’ve still got 3 stickers left. Any suggestions? UPDATE on Sunday: The Evil Mad Scientist site posted my pictures and some of the users there think I’m a horrible person because of it! They’re saying things like “That is illegal, and disgusting. Regardless of your loyalties, that is just uncalled for.” and “Ridiculous, childish and weak, weak humor. Vandalism is a sign of vacant creativity.” What a bunch of boring prudes! I should start putting “This product causes cancer!” stickers on merchandise and see how they react. |
posted on Wednesday, December 26th 2007 12:09 pm |
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Pretty much all day, every day, I read blogs. I use Google Reader to easily skim through them all without actually having to visit their web sites. Currently I’m subscribed to 53 blogs. Here are a few of my favorites:
I was going to list all 53 of my blogs here, but screw that. Those are my favorites. Everyone should go visit a few of them. But more importantly, please use the comments to tell me what your favorite blogs are. 53 is not enough for me and I need more to read. |
posted on Thursday, September 20th 2007 4:21 pm |
 Is it just me or does everyone get dozens of fake Myspace friend requests every day? It’s really getting out of control. And having to delete that many requests whenever I go online sucks. 9/24 UPDATE: I looked at the Myspace account settings today and found that they have CAPTCHA verification options for friend requests. All I had to do was turn it on. So my nonstop friend requests will probably stop now. |
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The PLA book contains stories from the PLA and notla.com.