I feel like I just stepped into a movie about the mafia - maybe the Godfather.
A little more than a week ago, I got the "confidential" communiqué in my email in-box.
It said it was from an actual hitman.
Apparently someone wanted me dead, and was going to pay this assassin $30,000 to whack me in some unpleasant manner.
Although, I suppose there's no pleasant way to actually get "whacked", unless I guess it's with a pillow.
But that'd make for a long and upon reflection, quite silly, assassination - so let's not mention pillows again, shall we?
Anyway, apparently this hitman has a heart of gold, and offered to keep me among the living for the same $30,000 sum.
So about 10 nanoseconds into reading this email, I knew it wasn't for real.
No, it wasn't the fact that a man who supposedly makes money coldly killing strangers would be miraculously touched enough by my life to suddenly have a change of heart and turn on his employers, thereby ending his lucrative career.
It was the fact that I don't know anyone who I possibly could have annoyed enough over the past lifetime to want to pay $30,000 to have me killed.
Heck, I don't think I know anyone who could scrounge together $30,000, unless maybe Microsoft really, REALLY didn't like my critiques of Vista and Windows 7.
Personally, I'd rule them out.
I'd seen a lot of variations on email scams in my geek lifetime, however I had not come across this particularly nasty flavoured one yet.
The majority of email scams are either new versions of the Spanish Prisoner con, or a phishing scam using a faked version of a trusted site.
The Spanish Prisoner is a scam that relies on people's greed to succeed, so it succeeds a lot.
Essentially, in the modern email version it consists of an advanced fee fraud, whereby someone offers to transfer millions of ill-gotten dollars into the bank account of the victim in return for small initial payments to cover bribes and other expenses.
But while the usual scams rely either on a lack of computer savvy or outright greed, this new one works on recipients' fear - going so far as to say if I went to the police my family would suffer the consequences.
After doing some research on the RCMP website and phonebusters.com, a Canadian anti-fraud call centre), I discovered this was indeed just a new, fear-based variation of the same old email scam, and nobody was actually going to come and try to suffocate me in my sleep with a pillow (damn, I mentioned pillows again!).
Their advice was to never respond to the emailer, ignore it or delete it.
The weird thing is that yesterday, I got the exact same letter (with a few tiny variations), from a completely different email address and "hitman".
Now I just feel like I'm in the movie Groundhog Day.
