Let us hope no literate people ever get into the 419 racket.

But then we wouldn't have cool new words like "Contactus"

If you've never seen a Contactus, you're missing out. They're really cool. They grow in the badlands of the internet, surviving for weeks without water or human interaction.

I bet the literate ones don't conduct the scam via spam.

I got one by snail mail a while back. It wasn't much better.

Wow, that turns my internal notion of the profitability of this scam on its nose. I had no idea this was profitable enough to pay for postage.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It was particularly odd, as it was mailed from the UK, and I live in Austria. I haven't quite figured out how they managed to get my address, I can only assume that they got it through the public business directory. (my home address is the same as the registered address of my freelance/consulting business, so I can't tell for certain) Why they'd mail me in English then (how do they know I speak it?) I have absolutely no idea.

Re. profitability, this older news might be of interest:

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22214192...

Umm, shouldn't the link to the company be set up as rel="nofollow"? Having an inbound link from paulgraham.com has got to boost your pagerank massively.

EDIT: oops, I missed the

  <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

tag, which will hopefully take care of it, although I'm not sure about its placement inside a HTML comment. Will that work?

NOODP != nofollow.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.

To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:

<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

This information is correct, I'm not sure why you have been downvoted...

You know you've made it when... :-)

Is it actually an attempt to impersonate pg qua pg, or just a random scam sent with a plausible-sounding combination of first and second names? Has it been targeted at founders, or is it just that founders are the only folks likely to forward the email back to pg?

>Is it actually an attempt to impersonate pg qua pg, or just a random scam sent with a plausible-sounding combination of first and second names?

The same thought crossed my mind. Believe it or not, I used to know someone named Paul Graham BEFORE I ever heard of pg... :p

So did I. Well the first and last names are common enough that its likely ;)

But that scam looks reasonably targeted.

It used to have my bio on the about page. They seem to have taken that out.

Paul Graham wants you to invest in investments to take care of your futua so he don't have to shoot ya:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzUr-xA_buY

The combination of the name and the investing in entrepreneurs premise seems like too much of a coincidence.

you have to wonder. if these poorly written engrish 419 scams have been successful enough to warrant the flood of them as well as all the media attention, how much damage could one do setting up a truly legitimate sounding one?

More damage, probably. But the thing is one would have to be well schooled in English to write a truly legitimate sounding one, and that would probably mean growing up in an English speaking country. That probably means that you live in an English speaking country (or other developed country) so you hopefully have some better options than being a scamster, and there is probably more local law enforcement to stop you. That's the universe balancing things out - not that I'm defending it at all. All that said, I'm sure some better written scams do exist.

I wonder what the most convincing scams are (the ones for which some HN folks would maybe fall)...

Lots of english speaking countries are not developed.

Sigh...here we go again. You do have to hand it to these people for doing a little bit of research and going as far as to set up a website for their "venture"

Yeah, you have to hand them 40% equity.

why are these things always so far fetched? If you are going to use Paul Graham name, why not use YCombinator as your company?

Definitely targeting pg and not some random Paul Graham; they're even using the "Y!" favicon on their site!

Lol, you know you have "geek street cred" when people are using your name to try and con other people. While this kind of sucks, I wish I have your problem someday.

The grammar! Please, blind me now before I read more.

Are random people getting these emails, or YC applicants? If the latter, how are they obtaining applicants email addresses?