Never Say Die

It's good to see that in this economic downturn, some people still have the entrepreneurial spirit. Just the other day I got one of those Nigerian scam e-mails. Yeah, I know, it's 2009, you'd think somebody would have told Nigeria their cover was blown. But this e-mail was good, or at least good for this kind of fraud.
   It seems that I 'legally won the sum of $800,000.00 USD from a Lottery Company outside the United States of America.' Which is really odd because I haven't entered a lottery outside the USA. But, okay, stranger things have happened to me, just read some of my earlier posts.
   Here's the kicker: the e-mail doesn't come from Nigeria, or at least it doesn't claim to. It's from the FBI. Our FBI, the one in the United States. The message doesn't come from an FBI e-mail address, but from the 'Anti-Terrorist and Monetary Crimes Division,' which, as far as I can tell, doesn't really exist. The street address given is, in fact, the J Edgar Hoover building, but the phone number is an international one with a prefix of... 234 which is the international calling code for, you guessed it, Nigeria.
   Does this work any more? I can see that back in 1995 it might have, e-mail was new, Al Gore had just invented the Internet, 'The Simpsons' was still funny and relevant, and cyberspace was fresh and unspoiled, ripe for abuse. Now, however, even little kids know that you can't get something for nothing out of Nigeria, and they still believe in Santa.
   More importantly, do the Nigerians try this scam on Chinese people? There are potentially waaaaay more gullible people in China, do they get e-mail from the 'Chinese FBI' telling them they've won a lottery in a foreign land?