And a lifelong eccentric now going senile, a juicy target for any scammer. I also played Arnold Hamenegger, the hard-boiled corporate security chief with the shadowy CIA contacts.

First, Rooster responded to a Nigerian scam email, from "Jon Kabila", sounding a bit confused and querulous. In the course of a couple of tentative email exchanges, Rooster establishes that he's wealthy and well-connected (names dropped included his nephew "W", a "high government official"). When things got serious, Hamenegger enters, and develops a plan to fly the corporate jet to Lagos, Nigeria by way of Baghdad (cover story is checking on reconstruction contracts, emergency landing on the return), drop off the million bucks in "expenses", and pick up the treasure chest of gold.

I created a Web site for "Petrocock Industries", complete with a private work area for projects like this. I gave the scammer "Jon" an account, and he went there to pick up documents like the PDF plan for the trip, and other props like a map.

The map was particularly mean on my part. I knew that Jon was often using an expensive satellite connection, and I created this huge map, hundreds of megabytes, just an ordinary map graphic enlarged 10X. I think I cost him some real bucks on that one.

Near the end, I added a new character, an up-and-coming Nigerian kid trying to horn in on the deal. I had him contact Jon on the sly, and those two were starting to develop a mentoring relationship, with Jon critiquing his work.

The endgame came when Jon logged in to the Petrocock site, to find a warning notice from Hamenegger to the other members of the project team that he'd just discovered that "Jon" was a scammer, and he was working with his contacts at Interpol to bust him. He said he'd cancelled Jon's account on the site, so Jon was led to believe he'd gotten in to see this message by mistake...and that there was still time to save his neck.

My last contact with Jon was an email to the interloping kid, saying he was leaving the country (I'd established he really was in Nigeria, and narrowed it down to one cybercafe), and didn't know when he'd be back in touch.

The postscript is that a few months later, I read a news story about Interpol busting a Nigerian scammer hiding out in Ireland. The story was sketchy, but the few details suggested that this was indeed my "Jon Kabila", and that I'd panicked him to the extent of fleeing to Ireland with his wife and kids.

He he he.