Spamfight is back – because you asked for it!

Years ago – a LONG time ago, as you will see – we had a member of the site who called himself “Nash Chovek Vladimir” or just “Nash Chovek” as he was known here.

Nash would bait Nigerian spammers and try to see exactly how long he could get them to hang on, desperate for money, and exactly what kind of pranks he could play on them along the way.

What brought Nash to my site was my Nigerian spam contest. My friend Doug and I were talking one day about how we each got about 3 emails that day, with each email promising us about $20 million. We added it up, and we were like “Between us, that’s like $120 million. Does Nigeria even have $120 million?”

It started off as a joke, but it took off. We decided we’d see who could get promised the most money from spammers over a six month period.

People gathered from across the internet, sending me their spam, which I dutifully tallied up. We offered up a $50 Amazon gift card to whoever could amass the most money, and as the contest grew, other prizes were added (including a free medieval weapon to the winner).

Along the way, a professor in Germany contacted me to assist her with her doctoral thesis, as I had amassed quite a collection of spam. The most interesting cultural phenomenon of the Nigerian spam? Spam targeting European addressed played on using the money for the recipient’s charities, while in the US it just played on our greed.

Finally, I was profiled by both the St Paul Pioneer Press and the Wall Street Journal because our winners of the contest – Naira, susu, and numbat – are the first (and possibly only?) people to have ever profitted off of Nigerian scam spam!

When the site came back, my friends over at “In the Name of God – The Podcast!” requested to see Spamfight again and the immortal adventures of Nash Chovek, the notorious Dr. Kaad Zias, and the supporting cast of Nigerian spammers.

Well, without further ado, I present the return of SPAMFIGHT – in all of its original FrontPage97 glory!