In the late 1990s, I got my first email account. Every so often, I’d receive an email, as everyone did, from a Nigerian prince who wanted to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams. All I needed to do was send him some money and bank routing numbers, and it would all fall into place. It seemed counterintuitive, I know, but maybe I should’ve trusted the prince. He seemed nice. Alas, I never took him up on his generous offer. Had I done that, I’d no doubt be a wealthy man now.
Recently I’ve received a spate of emails from enthusiastic readers who claim to absolutely love my work. The emails sound generated by an LLM, but no matter. They wish to make me rich: all I must do is fork over a few hundred dollars for publicity purposes, you see, and then my book sales will be off the charts and I’ll be raking in millions.
I was invited to a discord server, which I visited, out of curiosity. Who is running this scam, I wondered? I was greeted by a few people with handles like “Bookreader953” who told me how much they loved my work. When I asked what they loved about it, they couldn’t quite say. But they knew it was great, and I suppose that’s all that matters.
After this exchange, I logged onto my blog and saw that I had recently received a lot of hits from—you guessed it—Nigeria, as well as India and Pakistan. I’d never had anyone who’d visited my blog from those nations before, since my book was published by a small press without an international presence. But hey, I am always open to new readers.
I guess the Nigerian prince never went away. All these years, he’s been plotting new ways to make me rich.
Christopher Tuthill 