A popular trick among money transfer scammers is to create a fake website that's supposed to be the site of the imaginary company that will hire you to 'process payments' (translation: give away your life savings to the scammer). Some of these are exact clones of a real site, but in other cases a scammer will take a few photographs from one site, add some text from another and construct a sort of superficially-plausible mashup.

Sometimes, however, they give themselves away. Take, for instance, the scammer who created sharksdiving.cd, ostensibly a website belonging to a company offering cage-diving holidays. To get their raw material, they stole graphics and text from what appears to be a legitimate site, Shark Watch South Africa.

For some reason, however, they weren't content to create a simple clone. Instead, they decided to relocate their imaginary company to Thailand and to change the text appropriately. Unfortunately, they made a few errors. For example, it might have seemed like a good idea to replace the word 'African' with 'Asian', but in doing so they created the 'Asian penguin', a creature hitherto unknown to science. Apparently their home base is the 'breeding ground' of these remarkable birds, whose discovery is sure to excite ornithologists everywhere.

The photographs remained unchanged, including some nice shots of a Southern right whale, an animal that is not usually found in the warm waters off Thailand (check with Wikipedia if you don't believe me). And all those 'local people' whose photographs they show look strangely African to me. I hadn't realized that there were quite so many Africans living on the shores of Thailand (or the Philippines - the scammer is sometimes a little vague on precisely where they're located, although given the importance of protecting the rare Asian penguin from hunters and egg thieves, that's probably wise).

Oh, there's one last thing — the great white shark isn't found anywhere near Thailand either. I hate to be the one to break it to them, but I don't think that cage-diving for great whites in Thai waters has much of a future. But I guess that someone who thinks that 'fish' is spelt 'p-h-i-s-h' might not realize the importance of a detail like that.