You can't bring your "mini-gun" with you to fend off protesters, we're not going to shut down the tube, and if your secret service agents shoot any protesters by accident, we're not protecting them from being sued for it. We will make sure you don't have to see those big bad protests, though, so you can pretend that the population of the U.K. doesn't hate your guts.
So says the British Home Office. Is it just me, or is this one of the stupidest international visits ever?
On a more humorous note, some folks are having a lot of fun playing confuse-the-conman with the Nigerian spammers... engaging in protracted correspondence, not in the hopes of making off with a generous percentage of Robert Mugabe's nest egg, but for the chance to make total jackasses of the spammers. My favorite part of the article...
Mike, a 41-year-old computer engineer from Manchester, runs the scam-baiting site 419eater.com, which started two months ago. 'Almost always the scammer will think you are a real victim and try their best to extract money. It started because I used to get a few emails, and although I knew it was a scam I never knew how it worked. I did some research, found out about scam baiting and decided to have a go. It's now almost a full-time hobby for me.'Like most baiters, Mike replies in the names of made-up characters. His sites specialise in collecting pictures of the scammers in order to make it more difficult to find new victims. Using the pretext that in order to believe they are real people they need to take a photograph holding up signs with the name of Mike's character, he has succeeded in getting one fraudster to pose with a piece of paper stating: MI Semem Stains. Other sites feature similar pictures with signs reading 'Iama Dildo', 'Mr Bukakke' and 'Ben Dover'.
