Excerpt from some recent mail that takes the cake on verbosity and stupidity, as well as on attempts to sound patronizing and the sheer arrogance:
The next bit is the scary part and I understand why but it has to happen. You join [name removed], become an actual team member but also being on another company is fine too, as long as it doesn't go against your contract. You have to sign over the rights to the game to [name removed] Games or we can't legally claim it as our own or.. do anything with it. That is the scary part and I understand that, as it would scare me too. It's just the legal side of business.
Not your regular business correspondence, eh? Scary part, lol.
That's just the small excerpt from some mail (that did go on and on just like this for 3 pages). Conversation started off tiny and unspecific and with way better grammar, of course; it got like this only at the end.
What pisses me off the most is that some indie game developers, evidently, do/did fall for this scam (I imagine some fraction of indie game programmers are kids and/or borderline autistic and thus are easily taken advantage of) - assuming that this kind of con man earns something from his scam, and is not just a total loser who'd like to scam someone but cant.
I figure that's in part because the issue is kind of unpublicized. We're all nice people, and if you're writing about such topics, that makes you seem less nice yourself, right.
There's the nice suggestion for everyone. In business, be friendly, make a compliment or two, good for normal business. If you're talking with con man he'll think he built up the confidence, and his mail will lose any resemblance to legitimate business correspondence. The sooner con men go like this, the less time is spent in useless chitchat. After seeing what he wants you can either ignore him entirely or write something vaguely negative to watch the indignation (literally "i'm not a scammer" when you didn't even accuse anyone of anything).
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