226 african appropriations
M. Cahill: You are smart, aren’t you?
M. Krings: If I have offended you, I beg your pardon.
M. Cahill: No, no offense.
M. Krings: Let’s part on good terms.
M. Cahill: Maybe I will ask you that tomorrow.
M. K rings: OK, I am off.
M. Cahill: You have just started the game. We will play it together.
(icq , February 19, 2008)A minute after our conversation, my email inbox filled up with responses
to a n ema i l t hat had been d ispatched i n my na me a nd usi ng my add ress. I n
this email, I offered anyone who would help me with a transfer of several
million dollars a considerable proportion of this sum. I received more than
1,000 emails during the night. These were automatic responses issued by
the spam filters of some of the recipient addresses distributed throughout
the world. The actual number of emails sent in my name would have been
considerably higher. Mike Cahill even had his fun targeting the addresses
of members of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Hence, I found
myself owing explanations to a few newfound “friends” the next morning:
the first query came from the press office, followed by another from the
Institute of Physics, and so it continued for a few more days. Mike Cahill
succeeded in making a mugu out of me and asserting himself as master,
thereby maintaining the reversal of the roles of agent and patient implied
by the coinage “master and mugu.”
It is perhaps just consequential that in their search for new formats and
scamming strategies, 419 fraudsters also infiltrate the sphere of academic
communication—even without being given a perfect draft like the one
I sent to Mike Cahill. On two occasions in the past few years, I have re-
ceived emails from trustworthy African colleagues who claimed to have
been robbed of their money and mobile phones by thieves while on trips
to Accra and London, and therefore to be in desperate need of a quick
infusion of a few hundred euros, preferably to be sent via Western Union
money transfer. Scammers who stole their identities and used their email
contacts had clearly hijacked these two colleagues’ email accounts.