I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out
-- former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, from "Introduction to Poetry"


,i smell the kind of person whom you are and i like you
-- Staci

Back in February, when Staci first emailed me, I was nobody's fool. I've had email offers for my share of gold bullion, blood diamonds and the bulging contents of dead dictators' bank accounts over the last 10 years. And Staci was as obvious as they come. She was ostensibly replying to my craigslist ad for a housemate, but her tortured grammar and punctuation, and her overwrought back-story revealed something more elemental: This was the setup for just another con.

And yet it wasn't. This was the first time a scammer had emailed me personally. It made me stop and think for a few seconds. And in the space of time it should have taken me to hit the delete button, I decided to go on the offensive. There is, I know, nothing new or original about screwing with email scammers. In fact it has a name, scambaiting: tricking would-be con men into doing something humiliating. I get the vigilante impulse, but the cruelty makes me uncomfortable. So I decided I would be clever and a little witty and trick Staci -- a character created by a con artist somewhere in the world -- into writing me a poem.

Several months have gone by since then -- several months and one $3,550 check, four poems, 53 emails and more than 9,300 emailed words. We should have had the simplest of relationships: victim and thief. Instead there was fighting, sob stories, plagiarized poetry, fake drunk emails, fake photos and fake cops. And finally there was the moment where Staci forgot the difference between what was real and what was pretend. At the moment in a crime when a criminal should be fleeing the scene, Staci decided we had something more: a bizarre and twisted friendship.

At that point my con dissolved but our story continued. Or I should say Staci continued. I was left behind with a handful of bad poems, watching a pretend person try to turn lies into reality long after the truth, or at least what we chose to believe of it, had been revealed.

From the beginning I knew the scam Staci was going to run, and she followed the script perfectly: You offer something for sale or rent. The scammer responds and offers to send you money, ASAP, no questions asked. But after a few emails, a problem is revealed. And so they ask a favor: Can they send you a check for far more than you've asked for and then have you wire the remainder back, minus, of course, a generous fee as thanks for your help? Of course, you write in return. In a few days you get a very genuine-looking money order or cashier's check, you cash it and since it doesn't clear for a few days you have no idea that it's counterfeit. But by then you've wired the extra money from your account and now you're screwed. I would have lost about $2,500.

Since I knew Staci's script, I needed to create my own. I decided I would be a congenial, lonely older man who was willing to do anything to help young Staci out. I tried to create a specific writing voice. I set up the poetry angle early so I could reintroduce it later. That's because once I had the check, I knew I had her trapped: I would -- or at least this is how I thought it would go -- ransom me cashing the check against her writing me a poem.

But what really happened was not so simple. What really happened is Staci started to loose her mind.

A
roomwithascrew@gmail.com

Each section consists of an overview and a specific number of emails. Click on "Click to read emails..." to expand the posts.