The letters posted here illustrate  attempts at ADVANCE FEE FRAUD. The sender claims to be a bureaucrat, banker or royal toadies, who wants to cut you, and only you, in on the financial deal of a lifetime.

In plain English, the writer claims to be in a position to skim public accounts or in other ways move vast amounts of cash into your hands. Hint: There is no money to be moved except yours. Palms must be greased, with your money. A few K here, a few K there eventually you get wise, and retire to lick your wounds.

Other versions of the scam play on your sense of charity, your loneliness, or your naivete  . Orphan, cancer patient, dead bank customer, phony job offer, overpayment with a cashier’s check, different names or countries… same scam. You may be shown pictures of “money”. Same scam.

Setting aside the scammers’ willingness to take your last penny, the letters are funny. Read them out loud at parties and see. The 125 letters below introduce the literary genre of the Lads from Lagos.

Why “Lagos” ? Most such e-mails come from West Africa, chiefly Nigeria, or Nigerian expatriates  There are of course scam artists elsewhere. But these guys are special. Some people write them back just to waste their time. This is the art of scam baiting. Welcome to the Scamology. Most readers say “what an obvious scam!”. Some say “I was almost fooled till I saw this site.”A handful say “couldn’t mine be ‘real’?”

Spammers are hoping to rouse Obama critics to launch a cyber protest and to download malware onto their PCs in the process.

New spam is circulating that supposedly offers a way for people to use their computers to launch a denial-of-service attack on the Web site of President Obama, researchers said on Tuesday.

The e-mail message says: “If You dont like Obama come here, you can help to ddos his site with your installs.”

The e-mail then provides a link to a Web site where visitors are offered money for installing the supposed denial-of-service (DoS) software, according to a  on the site of e-mail security provider Proofpoint.

The spam site also tells visitors to come back and get updated versions of the purported denial of service software if their antivirus program is detecting it as malware and disabling it.

It’s not clear whether the software does turn the computer into a DoS attacking zombie, or what it does, if anything. But it would be crazy to expose your computer like that, regardless of your political leanings.