Commentary: October 2005 Archives

I just received the following e-mail:

From: Chong Pek Kee
Subject: request an autograph

I would like to request an autographed photo of you. Hope that's not a problem for you.
Here's my address:
Peggy Chong
[ADDRESS DELETED]
Perak, Malaysia.

Best wishes,
Peggy

Theoretically speaking, it is entirely possible that Peggy really wants my autograph. Maybe she's a fan of Yankee Fog or The Government Manual for New Superheroes. Maybe she's a slightly obsessive fan of Dennis Miller Live. Or maybe she's a really obsessive fan of The Onion.

Still, the e-mail smells like spam to me, mainly because it's so generic. Anybody who is enough of a fan of my work to want my autograph would know that I'm about as non-famous as writers get, and would therefore begin with an explanation of why she wanted an autographed photo of me.

If this is spam, though, it's puzzling spam. Is it part of some art project, to see how many autographed photos one can collect? A sort of fame-based phishing expedition, in which somebody is sending out thousands of e-mails in the hopes that some of them will reach actual celebrities whose autographs are worth having?

Either way, I hope posting here will resolve it. If Peggy is really a big enough Jacob Sager Weinstein fan to have tracked me to my website, she'll presumably see this post, and perhaps she'll be kind enough to comment on it and explain why she wants the photo. And if this is just a spam e-mail sent out to vast numbers of people, perhaps some of the other folks who have received it can pipe up.