My mom – protecting the elderly from fake email since 2002
You may or may
not recall, but my other venture aside from writing super important prose about
things like changing the batteries in my smoke detectors is making fun of spam
emails on my blog. The Lord’s work, I know, but I am not a hero. I am just a
man.
One of my
favorite things is when people send me their spam emails to write up. It makes
me feel like “Dear Abby,” except that instead of solving people’s
familial/emotional problems through great insight, I am recycling garbage on a
blog that at least 10 people know/care about.
One of those 10
people is my mom who, believe it or not, also occasionally sends me her spam
emails to write up. I have no doubt she tells all of her coworkers to forward
her spam emails so she can send them to her son who makes fun of them on his
blog. “You must be so proud,” they say to her, although my mom does not detect
the sarcasm and responds, “I am, I am. Now I know it was worth it to go back to
school myself so that I could get my nursing certification and pay for his
Catholic education and also college.” Then her coworkers don’t know if that
was sarcastic and just slowly back away from the conversation.
I talked to my
mom recently and she said she had a spam email for me, only it was on her phone
and she couldn’t figure out how to send it. I told her to just forward it to me
as she would an email—because, you know, it’s an email—but this was apparently
not an adequate suggestion. In my head I wished the Apple store employees luck
and patience for when my mom arrived there to set up an appointment at the
Genius Bar to figure out how to forward an email from her iPhone.
She was
disappointed too because the spam email was pretty great, she said. It claimed
to be from the FBI and came with detailed instructions about how to obtain her
supposed lottery winnings.
“Wow, that does
sound amazing,” I said.
“Yeah,” she
said. “It kind of worried me, though. So I actually contacted the FBI to let
them know.”
“Yeah. Wait, you
what?”
Indeed my mom
had gotten in touch with the FBI to alert them to her spam email. She was told
to use their website to fill out a complicated form, although I’m sure the gist
of the situation was provided in the section for additional comments: Dear
FBI, someone is trying to impersonate you guys and they’re saying I won the
lottery. My son writes about spam for a living so I am good at discerning these
things. If you need me to appear in court to testify, please send the info to
my regular email and not my phone because I am having trouble viewing email on
my phone. Oh, and just to be sure, I didn’t actually win the lottery, did I?
Ha, ha, j/k! Thanks, FBI! Love, Judy.
I asked my mom
why she took time out of her very busy day to do this, and she said, “God
forbid some 80-year-old woman gets fooled by this … it looks very legit.”
“Mom, why would
the FBI be telling someone they won the lottery? That is the opposite of
legit.”
“I know,” she
said while she laughed, “but still. You never know. You hear all the stories.
Of course, now they have all my information.”
I enjoyed the
fact that my mom, who brings communion to the hospital on Sundays and who does
things like contact the FBI about spam emails, was now worried about being in
the FBI’s crosshairs like she were starring in The Bourne Identity.
Days later she
finally managed to send me the email. It is as amazing as advertised. All she
has to do to get her $2.4 million is send $96 in shipping to “Mr. Ken Jackson,”
who is in charge of the “Anti-Terrorist and Monetary Crimes Division,”
ironically. Somewhere, an 80-year-old woman was doing just that before the
actual FBI broke down her door and dramatically stopped her.
Thanks to my
mom.
Note: This column appears in the 12/19 issue of The Glendale Star and the 12/20 issue of the Peoria Times.
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