What the F**k is the Deal with Nigeria?

So, I get around five hits a day from Nigeria [UPDATE 11-24-06: Only a week from posting this, I am now getting 22-30 hits a day from Nigeria], all different IP addresses, all having dropped onto my journal via google, yahoo, msn, etc... by searching for things like: "R" and "@hotmail.com", or "M" and "@yahoo.com", things like that, in order to harvest email addresses for their shitty scams. Strangely, a majority of the scams I get in my email originate in Nigeria. You know the drill. BANK OF AMERICA NEEDS YOUR VERIFICATION, or PLEASE HELP ME I AM RICH I NEED AN AMERICAN, or even COME AND MANAGE OUR COMPANY! These are scams that keep circulating, being reworded over and over again. I get these various scams perpetually, as do most people. The most annoying part of it is that Hotmail, over the last few months, seems to be letting more and more of these through. I was getting one or two of these a day in my junkmail folder, and now I'm getting around ten a day, in my inbox, and three or four in my junkmail. The best are the ones that pretend to be from some poor widow in Africa who's husband died tragically, but they have 65 million U.S. dollars (I've even received several that claim to have billions) that their government wants to take, or an estranged, problematic family member, or whoever, so they need you're bank account information and a copy of your passport, etc... Wow. Most of these don't say so right away, but that's the end result. They want your shit. The things they could do with information like that is frightening. I take a strange sort of glee, as well as guilt, in knowing that the rather large lists of publications and editors on my main page are most likely getting ads for sex pills and fraudulent paypal.com scams because I and many others have listed their contact info. A shame. Or not. [UPDATE 11-23-06: I have removed the email addresses of all publications on my main page, due to several editors asking me to, and common sense. It was easier to remove all of them, rather than a few, and anyway, if you're wanting to submit to one of those magazines, you should familiarize yourself with them and follow their guidelines.] Anyway, you scammers over in Nigeria with your computers and spider-software, all your obnoxiously transparent scams, I just wanted to make sure you know you're human parasites and big bags of ratshit. Choke on beancurd. Or better yet, put away your keyboards, go to Yankari, and get jumped by one of these:

Here's an interesting link to someone who had a little fun with these troublemakers:

http://spl.haxial.net/nigerian-fraud/

I'm still not certain why, but I've been saving these scams in a folder. Again, I don't know why. Perhaps when my children have children and I'm seventy, I'll tell my great grandkids about all these scams and they won't believe me, so I'll be able to whip out this folder, if folders still exist, and prove that it was all real. People were this shitty to each other. Sort of like if someone were to show you one of those old sham contracts from the 1920's indicating the sale of the Brooklyn Bridge to some random person.

Here's a partial screenshot:

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UPDATE 12-10-06: Just received a hit from a very specific Nigerian scammer, who reached my site via this Google search: "EMAIL CONTACT ADDRESSES OF CATHEDRAL CHURCHES IN CHESTERFIELD". So, due to the rather large number of churches in the news lately as falling prey to Nigerian scammers, I thought I'd give a 'heads up' to Chesterfield:

Hey holy guys in Chesterfield, specifically, you guys that work in the cathedral churches, watch out for this guy: