Fifteen minutes ago, I got this email from a playwright friend:

I’m sorry for this odd request because it might get to you too urgent but it’s because of the situation of things right now,I’m stuck in United Kingdom with family right now,we came down here on vacation ,we were robbed, worse of it was that our bags, cash and credit cards were stolen of us at GUN POINT, it’s such a crazy experience for us, we need help flying back home, the authorities are not being 100% supportive but the good thing is that we still have our passports but don’t have enough money to get our flight ticket back home, please i need you to loan me some money, i will refund you as soon as I’m back home, i promise.

I emailed back:

John,

Is this for real? I’m going to message you through Facebook as well.

Lee

And so I did:

John, I got this email from you. Is this for real, or is this a phishing expedition?

Three minutes later, I got this reply:

No!!!lt isn’t a virus, I’m in this situation for real, I’ve been finding it difficult to make overseas calls from here. My phone’s out of service, probably because I’m outside the states. It has really been embarrassing for me,I’m very sorry for not informing you about our trip to U.K but I’m sure i can explain better when i return,I need some $$ as I have nothing on me now, was wondering if you could loan me $1,980, I’ll refund it to you as soon as I arrive home i will be glad to read from you soon.

John

And I got a Facebook chat message, “Hey Lee. You there?”

But I had already responded to the previous FB message with this:

What’s the name of the dvd you gave me? What happens to the lead character?

When I got no response to that, I messaged back: “Thought so. Contacting Facebook now.”

And I called my friend on his home phone back here in Los Angeles — and he answered. Right away. Why was he up? Because other friends who’d gotten that email called him to check. It’s 6:46 a.m. here and I doubt he would have been up otherwise.

Needless to say, he wasn’t robbed at gunpoint in the UK, and if he had been, a call to American Express or the U.S. Consulate or his bank or any number of other authorities would have loosened up some of his cash. I also let him know over the phone that if he had really been in a jackpot, I would have wired him the money. One of the things that made the phishing expedition so believable was the reasonable amount of cash requested.

What tipped me off that it wasn’t him? It’s not just the idea that John would have to inform me in advance that he was going to London (why would he have to do that?). It was the writing in the last sentence:  “It has really been embarrassing for me,I’m very sorry for not informing you about our trip to U.K but I’m sure i can explain better when i return,I need some $$ as I have nothing on me now, was wondering if you could loan me $1,980, I’ll refund it to you as soon as I arrive home i will be glad to read from you soon.” I think John would sooner shoot himself in the head than leave those personal pronouns uncapitalized, or write a run-on sentence fragment like that.

It comes in handy to know your friend’s writing voice.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 7:02 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.