INTRODUCTION

As with anyone with an email address, I've been the target of the occasional money scam from Nigeria and China. Of course, I always deleted them. 

Until I decided to start stringing them along for my own amusement. The exchanges tended to be brief, most crooks not having the patience to fool around with a wiseacre. What they have in common are admonishments to steer clear of scams -- but their offer was for real.

Our conversations are below, along with commentary in red in between. I've highlighted my replies in blue in order to tell the messages apart.

(Note: all misspellings, punctuation errors and grammatical madness are part of the original emails.)