To quote Billy Shakes, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times for one Internet scammer, who thought he pulled one over on a Bristol resident, and now his phone hasn’t stopped buzzing for a week. Edd Joseph, 24, paid £80 for a Playstation 3 on U.K. classifieds site Gumtree, but he never received it.
“My first thought was that I could try and pretend I had found out where he lived but it was all a bit of a cliche and it wasn’t going to worry him really,” Mr. Joseph told the Telegraph. ”Then it just occurred to me you can copy and paste things from the internet and into a text message. It got me thinking, ‘What can I sent [sic] to him’ which turned to ‘what is a really long book,’ which ended with me sending him Macbeth.” (Via)
Not just Macbeth, but ALL of Shakespeare.
Macbeth soon led to Hamlet, Othello, and 19 other plays sent via text message. Mr. Joseph simply copies and pastes the plays into his phone’s text message field, and sends them off to his scammer. When they reach the scammer’s phone, they presumably come through in 160-character segments — meaning the 22 plays Mr. Joseph has sent were broken up into a very irritating 17,424 text messages.
If Joseph had been REALLY mad, he would have shortened Shakespeare’s gorgeous prose into text-speak. “The Two Gentlemen of Verona. That’s a whole different kind of torture.