Oh, C.W. Gusewelle — we can’t help but be taken in by his purple prose. He writes in the fashion of the newspapermen of yore, lacing complex sentences with finely wrought baroque clauses and peppering his phrases with Safire-esque rococo word choices. He’s a delight, honestly. Imagine our sadness, then, to read that C.W. and Mrs. C.W. were conned by a man claiming to be a friendly KU student. Say it ain’t so!
It’s true: the Gusewelle household fell under the spell of a seemingly munificent stranger offering to wash the windows Saturday if C.W. merely hands over a check today. All in the name of fundraising, you see. C.W., ever the vigilant consumer, makes clear that he never falls for this kind of thing.
With some regularity I receive electronic messages from individuals purporting to be Nigerian bankers or solicitors with a law firm in London. An extremely wealthy client has died. This correspondent has met with unexpected bureaucratic problems in distributing the estate. It has become necessary to first pass the funds through an account in the U.S. I do reply by e-mail. Every time.“Please know that a copy of your message has been forwarded to the fraud office of the attorney general of our state. Do stay in touch. We’d love to welcome you for a rather long visit.”
Ha! What a playful scamp! Unfortunately, C.W.’s con-dar was in this case temporarily subdued by the charming mountebank he found on his doorstep. The young window washer, shockingly, never showed.
We took a closer look at the receipt he’d written. Only his first name was legible. He’d professed to be a local lad, raised on a street just three blocks from ours. We checked the neighborhood directory. There was no family on that street with a name that in any way matched his scribble.
“We’ve been had,” I told my wife.
Though we both already knew it.
Alas. Fear not for the Gusewelle family finances, though — they were able to stop payment on the check. Here’s hoping that C.W.’s future charitable choices involve a bit more scrutiny. No more oleaginous characters will be duping him, no sir!
[...] crossed the threshold from mere financial con to full-blown web meme. Hell, even C.W. Gusewelle knows about it. In other words, the scam now occupies its own place in the pop culture pantheon, to the point [...]
[...] purple prose aficionado C.W. Gusewelle doesn’t like cheaters. It irks him when, for example, people claiming to be KU students come to his door and offer to wash his windows, then skip town with his [...]