magha
n.— «The targets are called maghas—scammer slang from a Yoruba word meaning fool, and refers to gullible white people.…The e-mail scammers here prefer hitting Americans, whom they see as rich and easy to fool. They rationalize the crime by telling themselves there are no real victims: Maghas are avaricious and complicit.» —“I Will Eat Your Dollars” by Robyn Dixon in Festac, Nigeria Los Angeles Times Oct. 20, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
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I must see thousands of these come through–or rather *attempt* to come through–every day. I have several “spam-trap” fake email addresses that block the IP of anyone sending to any of those fake email addresses. Thus, my 419-scam count is extremely low.
Out of maybe 5,000 attempts each day, two might slip through.
There’s a link at my Web site on how to set up such a filter. The web site is http://www.cmosnetworks.com, and the article first appeared on Linux.com last year.
–TP