"Congratulations! You've just won a lottery worth ₹10000000. To claim your winning amount, please send in your details along with your account number!"
Emails bearing news of lottery bonanza from Nigerians, Coca-Cola or even RBI are not unheard of. As much as you want the mails to be genuine, fact is that you didn't even buy a lottery ticket in the first place.
What's your first reaction when a mail saying you just won ₹3.6 crores, pops in your inbox? FAAAAKE!
Like this.
Or a mail from Raghuram Rajan.
While the cringily colourful mail is an easy giveaway that the lottery email is OBVIOUSLY fake, last year, Hate Story 3 actor Karan Singh Grover apparently fell for just such a Nigerian fraudster and lost lakhs.
The best way to react to such emails is to simply ignore them. But one guy -- Vaibhav Vishal -- came up with a genius idea of replying to a scamster who had "reviewed" Vishal's CV for visa application for immigration to Canada.
The catch here is that Vishal had never sent his CV to Suman Jha a.k.a the scamster. "I am a big fan of Justin TrudoeuTredaeuTreduae Trudeau. I like Canada. I like Canadians. I also like Punjabi, the language most of the Canadians speak. So, naturally, I was intrigued when I got a mail with the subject "Canada Immigration" from one Suman Jha," Vishal wrote on his blog.
At first, Vishal ignored the mail. "I did what any self-respecting man secure with the belief that the best career opportunities were available in Canada with high earning job profiles for foreign skilled workers would do. I ignored his mail," Vishal added. But Jha the scamster was determined and sent a few more emails to Vishal in the weeks that followed, telling him about the "golden opportunity".
"He sent a few more emails over the next four weeks, reminding me of the interest I had shown, asking me for the details of my documents, and promising me the completion of my documentation under the fast-track services."
But what really moved Vishal was a typo -- "It;s".
"That one sentence did the trick," he writes. "Guess I was hit somewhere deep inside – the semicolon hitting the colon, as they say – and that was enough to shake me out of my complacence. I was charmed and charged by the radiance of the golden opportunity, ready to immediately take on his offer. I was raring to go. And Canada was waiting," Vishal wrote on his blog.
*DRUM ROLL*
Vishal finally replied with some good and bad news.
Vishal got no response but he was determined to get one. So he dropped him a mail again.
Suman finally replied. And a really, really funny one.
Vishal sincerely apologised.
To which scamster Suman replied...
Vishal responded with his details and a hilarious CV.
Scamster Suman realised it was a reverse trap.
Vishal didn't give up. He even wrote a song for scamster Suman.
Scamster Suman didn't know who he was dealing with and finally gave in.
Vishal went ahead and sent him fake details along with PM Modi's photoshopped degree.
Scamster Suman was scammed. Scammed with a headache Vishal gave him for days with his poetic emails.
You can read the entire email exchange here on Vishal's blog.
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