Yes, everything you read on the Internet is true
By Nury Vittachi
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I am an internet addict and yesterday I had my best ever day. I logged on to receive an email from Dr Idowu Ndubueze in Nigeria who has US$70 million accidentally left over from a big oil company deal. He wants to give me 20 per cent just for looking after his cash. That’s US$14 million! What a way to start the day. I wrote back and said, yes please.
I decided to spend the first couple of million bucks in advance by investing in a diamond company “guaranteed to soar in value” according to an insider hot stock tip from a kind stranger emailing me from a place called Andorra.
But before I could reply, I was forwarded an email about a poor nine-year-old kid dying of cancer and if you clicked on the link, the Make-a-Wish-Foundation would pay for his medicine. Well now I was rich, I wanted to pass my good luck on. As I was about to click the link, an email appeared with URGENT in the subject box.
Before I could read it, I had to delete a piece of spam offering to increase the length and girth of one of my favourite organs. Wow, is their ad-targeting system out of line!
The urgent note was from a friend who said that Bill Gates was going to cancel the entire MSN service in a week and would only change his mind if we forwarded this particular email to everyone in our address book to increase web traffic. If we sent it to 20 people we would have brilliant luck but if we sent it to only 10 people we would only have okay luck but if we sent it to less than 10 people something really bad would happen to us like our crush would ignore us for a week.
I had only managed to forward it to seven friends when I got an MSN message about this guy who bought a meal from Kentucky Fried Chicken and it turned out to be a deep fried rat! Ewwww! It happened to a friend of a friend of his last week. I decided to cheer the guy up by forwarding a cookie recipe from Neiman Marcus. It’s worth US$250 so it’s a good deal.
But before I could find the recipe in My Documents, an email arrived from the head of HSBC, the bank. He was writing from a hotmail account, which seemed a bit strange, but his note explained that he was checking up on his customers’ bank account details, and could I please input my name and bank account and password so that my money would be safe.
How kind of him! This will ensure that the US$14 million I get from Dr Idowu Ndubueze in Nigeria will be safe.
But before I could input my password, an email flashed up from a group called “the Darwin Awards committee” about someone who had died horribly. Apparently this guy felt a bug crawl into his ear so he decided to get rid of it by sticking a stick of dynamite into his ear and lighting it. He got the idea from the Internet. The explosion blew his head right out of the window.
Wow, it’s amazing how gullible some Internet users can be.
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