by Giles Cadman
The internet has increased the ability for fraudsters to contact huge numbers of people with their fraudulent messages. This distribution on a massive scale is different from previous centuries, but there were similar frauds being perpetuated back then.
On the whole, though, unsolicited emailers were pariahs in the early days of the Internet. They offered a first glimpse of a future in which digital gatekeepers selected by government agencies and elite universities got swamped by a horde of anonymous jerks and tacky advertisements. These early debates about the form and function of electronic messages heralded the public, uncontrolled, and uncensored Internet we know today.
The history of trolling over long distances, however, stretches back at least to the Victorian era.
Robert Whitaker, a historian of international crime and policing, studies fraudulent letters from the 19th and early 20th centuries that were part of an international con known as the Spanish Prisoner Scheme. “In this confidence trick,” he explains,
The type of scam dating well before the internet seems similar to the scams used now.
Whitaker has uncovered documents from 1905 supposedly written by a distressed Spaniard named Luis Ramos and Jean Richard, a prison chaplain. Addressed to a London shopkeeper named Paul Webb, these letters are straight out of the email scam playbook: Ramos claims to have “property valuable to £37.000” deposited “in a sure English Bank,” and he’ll give Webb a cut if the Englishman agrees to send Ramos a small amount of money to bail his 14-year-old daughter out of prison.
This early scam letter is also very much of its time, though: Whitaker shrewdly observes that it resembles a Dickensian novel, complete with an imprisoned child who “seeks a new guardian to share a large inheritance amidst the backdrop of continental political intrigue.”
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