What happens when the ubiquity of Nigerian email scams gets to the point when even trusting myopic grannies start wildly flipping the double deuce at the screen when they see yet another “URGENT ASSISTANCE FROM MR. KOBE UBUNTU” email in their inbox? They bring it down a notch on the luddite ladder:

Jeff’s full email and another pic after the jump.

Maybe this is old news for you hip folks at the consumerist, and its not really a consumer-getting-the-shaft story, but on Friday at work I received (as my brother aptly named it) the ‘Nigerian snail-mail scam’. In short, I received by postal mail an all-caps form-letter from a BANGA IDRIS who is an Angolan refugee in S. Africa who needs some help getting millions of dollars out of an african bank. Its like an old-school twist on spam e-mail.

I assume he (or she?) found my office address at the university on my professional web-site.

Have attached a couple of pictures taken with my camera phone… its hard to see, but the stamps are S. African.

What the hell? It’s news to us. This doesn’t make a lick of sense: email’s cheap, postage isn’t. You can send out a million emails for pennies; on the other hand, the number of letters you’d have to send out to make this scam work would soak up any proft you’d make off of the lone sucker. What’s next? Singing candygram?

Anyone have any ideas? Or is this just the stupidest Nigerian scammer ever?

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