DoodiePants

Been a little crazy down here in Costa Rica.  Online Poker sites have been getting busted left and right.   I don’t quite understand how the USA manages to get it’s hands into Expat money so often, but I suppose that some country offering the infrastructure for these online poker sites and poker tournaments deserves at least a small share of the earnings.   Brent Beckly from Costa Rica’s “Absolute Poker” recently got nailed by the US feds.  Sentencing for Mr. Beckly has been put off until June 28th.  He’s shooting for 12-18 months for pleading guilty.   We’ll see what the Judge says.

I have a feelin' theses girls are outta work

Eight months after being charged by U.S. prosecutors in a crackdown on Internet gambling, the co-founder of online poker Web site Absolute Poker folded and pleaded guilty to criminal charges.  Brent Beckley, a co-founder of Costa Rica’s Absolute Poker, was among 11 people charged in April with violating U.S. laws against illegal gambling.  Federal prosecutors in Manhattan alleged the founders of poker Web sites Absolute Poker, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker and others disguised billions of dollars from U.S. gamblers as payments to fake online retailers Continue Reading…

Currently Nigerian scam artists may be the most poorly trained yet functional English users on the planet.  What’s Nigeria’s national language?   English.  Unfortunately, Nigeria now has its own version of “Sesame Street”, named “Sesame Square”. This can only mean one thing.  In the next few years, Nigerian scam emails will be written with decent English making them much more difficult to decipher.

Yes, That email from Mr. Barrister Yneki whose father recently died with a 4 Million dollars worth of Gold bullion trapped in a UK Bank account may soon be spelling error free.  And that fake PayPal funds deposit email might actually have the word “Transaction” spelled correctly.   Future scam victims will have to start using their brains and ask themselves, “why would someone with a ridiculously odd name that doesn’t match their email claiming to be from an eastern African country randomly email me and offer me large amounts of money”?   What…..a Nigerian scam?  No way!

Nigerian Scam emails and Sesame Street

The new “Sesame Square” show has a bunch of the characters from the US show, a Bid Bird with a Nigerian Accent, a furry monster obsessed with eating Yams and a character with AIDS who’s mother died.   It would be perfect if there were an Oscar the Grouch character that sits around all day figuring out new ways to rehash 419 email scams.  A grouch that sits around and writes up Nigerian scam emails and sends them to unsuspecting kids and old people would be epic.  Then there could be episodes where penpal kids from the US get scammed out of their allowance and report the Grouch the FBI.  Or they mail off their copy of Call of Duty 3 to Nigeria only to find out the PayPal payment was bunk.  I could think up new episodes all day.  Continue Reading…