In the world of fast-paced communications, it’s easy to fall prey to a whole host of malicious content.

Such as is the case with spam emails. From unclaimed insurance bonds to Nigerian princes looking for someone to help them transfer money, you can never be too careful with what you see on your email account.

Sometimes, however, you just happen to fall prey to spam emails every once in a while, so what happens when you do reply to a spam email?

Playing with the spammer

James Veitch just so happened to have stumbled across such an email. Rather than deleting the message, he did what most of us have been tempted to do at least once – he sent a response to it.

He wrote in his first reply:
“Solomon,
Your email intrigues me.”

His TEDTalks video showcases the correspondence between him and the spammer, and the result was hilarious. You can check out the video here:

In my profession, there are two things that I have learned when it comes to spam emails. One, there’s always going to be another person behind it. Two, one of them will try to goad you into falling for their scam.

At the very least, James played with the spammer by letting him think that he was interested. One case that’s very similar to James’ and Solomon’s exchange is the Nigerian prince email. Almost a decade ago, a lot of people fell for this scam because it looked really legitimate.

The email addresses did not look automatically generated, so why would anyone think of it as anything but fraudulent? If I remember correctly, there was one instance where the victim sent her bank account information and then she was hacked.

Spam emails are very annoying and unfortunately we have to deal with them pretty much every single day. Of course, you can always reply to them for fun. You might even get some hilarious responses out of them like James Veitch did.

One piece of advice: if you DO reply to spam emails – do NOT use your main email address. Use a free email address from a service such as gmail or similar that you don’t use for your regular email. You don’t want your business or private email flooded with more spam than you can handle!