Start a home business, get rich quick, win financial freedom! If you watch late-night TV, you've heard it all before. But what's the story behind these slick pitchmen and their dubious schemes? Enter The Salty Droid, your ornery metal guide to the corrupt underworld of scam-marketing scum. This charmingly acerbic bot (owned and operated by mild-mannered Chicago dog-lover Jason Michael Jones [inter-view, long talk + transcript]) is a valiant crusader against the vile con-men who bankrupt the elderly and the desperate with beautiful lies. Exposed so far: A shadowy "Syndicate" of frauduct-pushing personality cults polluting the media with blogspam and woo-woo talking points. Boiler rooms in the Utah desert where telemarketers farm credit from easy targets with cunning, probing scripts [PDF]. Powerful politicians bought wholesale. Believers left to die in fraudulent new-age vision quests. It's a soul-crushing beat, enough to make one feel like a regular catcher-bot in the digital rye. But somebody's got to do it -- preferably someone with plasma nunchucks and titanium skin.
posted by Rhaomi on Aug 31, 2011 - 47 comments

User-submitted inspiration for comics and art: Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines (prev), and more refined comics from "normal" text spam text. Cartoons drawn from titles sent to one Sam Brown (pseudonym of Adam Culbert). Artists send artwork, someone else adds the text. Submit a video game title and description and get the box art made for you, courtesy of MeFi's own cheap paper [via mefi projects].
posted by filthy light thief on May 26, 2010 - 21 comments

THE ELEMENTS OF SPAM (single link McSweeney's post)
posted by bystander on Jan 14, 2009 - 38 comments

We've all recieved one of those Nigerian Email Scams, but now we have it in a video format (qt format) I almost wanted to help him out, but then he never did leave any contact info.
posted by thebwit on Oct 30, 2004 - 6 comments

A new twist on the Nigerian Money Laundering Scam Spam? Everybody has a little cash-flow problem now and then...
posted by TCMITS on Aug 23, 2002 - 9 comments

Spamthrax! Anthrax via e-mail? Don't panic, it's from SatireWire.
posted by ferris on Oct 20, 2001 - 9 comments