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Valentin Mikhaylin, a young man who lives in Kaluga, Russia, and who represents himself as a student starving and on the verge of freezing to death, has been spamhandling on the Internet since 1998. His e-mailed appeals are generally loosed upon the unsuspecting in November of each year, perhaps because the final month before Christmas tends to spark the charitable impulse in thegreatest number of people, leaving a larger number than usual vulnerable to phony person in distress scams such as this one: Over the years, the details given in his annual appeal for financial assistance have changed. In the 1999 and 2000 versions (quoted above and below, respectively), he presented himself as the spokesperson for a group of workers in Russia who had not received their pay in months and whose parents were having to sell blood just to put food on the table. Notice that the invalids, according to him, were not receiving any money from the government: In November 2001, he presented himself as a college student living with an invalid mother and brother. These two disabled family members, he said, received small pensions from the government: In 2002, he described himself as a 20-year-old college student, still living with an invalid mother (now said to be blind; her affliction had not previously been mentioned) and brother, but this time saying his mother received a government pension while his brother did not: In 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, he was once again an impoverished college student living with his mother, but no reference was made to his having a brother, invalid or otherwise: In 2007 the annual scam was circulated yet again, but this time naming the letter's sender as Elena, the woman identified in previous finaglings as Valentin's mother. That time around, Elena was presented as a 30-year-old abandoned single mother with a 6-year-old daughter named Angelina, and there was no mention of Valentin or his brother: In a second 2007 version of the scam, the appeal reverted to Valentin. In this version, he was no longer a college student but instead now had a cardio-vascular illness. His mother was still represented as a blind woman who received a small pension from the government which was not enough even for medications. The 2008 version once again had Valentin living with his blind mother whose indemnity is not enough even for food and medications, but Valentin made no mention of 2007's cardio-vascular illness, instead presenting himself as someone who recently lost his job and was holding a temp position that would last for only a couple of weeks: The 2009 version once again (see the first of the 2007 entries quoted above) named the letter's sender as Elena, the woman identified in previous iterations as Valentin's mother. This time around, Elena was presented as a 32-year-old abandoned single mother with an 8-year-old daughter named Anghelina, and there was no mention of Valentin or his brother. However, the 2009 version had Elena and her daughter living with Elena's unemployed mother: According to a 2000 article run in a Russian daily (translation here), Valentin Mikhaylin, then a 17-year-old student at the builders' technical school in Kaluga, began his online panhandling career by sending Please help us! emails that detailed the projected plight of the Russian poor for the winter of 1998-1999 and asked recipients to contact ham radio clubs and individuals to get them to send help. That article claims between December 1998 and January 1999, the Mikhaylins (Valentin, his elder brother, and his mother) received 79 envelopes from abroad in response to that entreaty. They took in an additional 24 envelopes and 48 parcels during the first five months of 1999. These various postings contained a variety of durable items, food, and money. While it could be concluded the success of that 1998 begging spree prompted a nascent scam artist to attempt similar frauds each succeeding year, the Oxpaha.ru article referenced above says that a 1999 inquiry ordered by the Moscow international post office described the perpetrators as ... the Michajlin family, long known to us, who have been busy with international begging for many years. Valentina Savina, the director of that agency, wrote of the Mikhaylins as these people [who] describe themselves as penniless invalids and disseminate slanderous information regarding the wrongs that they have suffered. That same article details a number of battles between Valentin Mikhaylin and the Internet service provider in his area, the local phone company, and the post office. (Subsequent to his e-mailed plea for help, his box was receiving so many parcels that the service deemed his operation a money-making enterprise and attempted to charge him the business rate for his box.) Rather than delve into each of his business squabbles, we note the salient point of those episodes is his being sent to a prison for temporary detention over his mode of handling his dispute with the postal service (i.e, distributing a leaflet defaming it, including tacking up a copy within the post office proper). Mikhaylin's methods for handling exposure of his money-making fraud enterprise appear equally unsavory. According to Paolo Attivissimo, the webmaster who posted the English translation of the Oxapa.ru article on his site: Frauds like these succeed because those perpetrating them frame their solicitations as heart-rending stories about suffering that you, kindhearted person that you are, could alleviate by sending an array of goods or just plain old-fashioned money. The Internet has made the con artist's job easier: he no longer has to go face-to-face with the clientele he's looking to plunder and so generally doesn't risk his marks' figuring out that they're being had. In this case, only the persistence of the grifter brought him to our attention — year after year he's been hitting the Internet with variations on the same con. Had he been less perseverant, had he instead hit once and run, we'd have never caught on to him. We've said this before, but it bears repeating: Beware the pull on your heartstrings — it's often the pursestrings that are actually being reached for.
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