Man Of Few Words

Chapter 6

There's an art to writing a scam letter. A brutal, remorseless, mercenary, almost cruel art, yes. But an art nonetheless. My task with each commission was to tiptoe balletically along the fringes of the law, making our victims believe in the most preposterous falsities without actually ever telling them that they were true. No, I couldn't do that. That would be lying.

It was much like writing for porn mags, in many ways. In both cases, you're selling a false promise. Of course with porn, your audience knows that he's not going to have sex with the girl, but if you present your material properly, you help him to convince his genitalia that that's exactly what he really is doing. Think about it, your dick gets hard and ejaculates for a reason, and that reason is not simply to give you something sticky to wipe off your tummy. So masturbation really is an act of trickery. That's why you feel so melancholy and regretful immediately following a tug – it's your dick, in a moment of solemn realisation, sending a message to your brain, expressing its disgust at being lied to. "It seemed so plausible..." it whines. "You took advantage of my willingness to believe..." it lectures. "Again," it mumbles, trailing off.

In the same way a scam letter tells you you've won a car or a cruise or £10,000, porn tells your dick it's won a no-strings shag with a pretty, young, insatiable nymphomaniac. But dicks are rather easier to fool. People, even dumb, desperate ones with very little sense and only slightly more money, need to be lured with rather more craft.

But the hardest part, the part I turned out to have a real gift for, was writing the script for the long, drawn-out recordings you'd hear if you were stupid enough to call to claim your prize. Would it be the car? The cruise? The cash? Or the mystery prize worth £1,000?

It was always the mystery prize, of course, and it was only worth £1,000 in the most convoluted, distorted, barely true terms. It was usually £1,000 worth of discounts that you could only get if you spent a fortune on something in volume (usually holidays, or some kind of subscription or membership based service), and that was on top of the fortune you'd already spent on the call, thanks to my talent for making you think there really was a pot of gold waiting for you at the end of the premium-rate rainbow. It was wordy, and it was repetitive. But it was oh so very enticing.

Did I feel guilty about it? I didn't give it much thought. The direct marketing companies I worked for were all operating within the law and, more than anything else, I just enjoyed discovering there was something I was really good at. And it's not like very much of that premium rate call money ended up with me anyway. It was actually the poor pay, and not any hint of guilt, that was the reason for me eventually moving on.