Spamming For Time Travel
from the sign-me-up dept
One of the odder, but more popular posts on Techdirt was one where someone asked in the comments for help with time travel (because, clearly, Techdirt's comment pages are the best place to find time traveling experts). Around the same time there were a number of spam emails going around looking for some bizarre equipment necessary for (the spam message claimed) time travel. Wired News gets to the bottom of this and tracks down the time traveling spammer, who seems quite serious about his desire for time travel equipment. Apparently, some folks have been selling him junk like old hard drives, and claiming it was the equipment he needed. Ever since these spam messages started flowing into in-boxes, people have wondered if it was just a joke, a bizarre scam to harvest more email addresses, or just someone who was mentally disturbed. It might be a combination of them all. The guy also appears to operate a more typical spamming business - even though he was told by the Massachusetts Attorney General's office to stop in 2001.
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Just received one of these last night...
The vulcan science academy states that time travel is impossible. If this guy watched enough TV, he'd know that too. This guy needs help.
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Is there a market for extra-slow electrons?
One time, someone sent me an airmail package from Japan, which normally arrives here in a week. For some reason, it took a month. Perhaps it got on a very slow-flying airplane.
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Re: Just received one of these last night...
Wednesday March 19, 2003
By CHAD KULTGEN
NEW YORK -- Federal investigators have arrested an enigmatic Wall Street wiz on insider-trading charges -- and incredibly, he claims to be a time-traveler from the year 2256!
Sources at the Security and Exchange Commission confirm that 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin offered the bizarre explanation for his uncanny success in the stock market after being led off in handcuffs on January 28.
"We don't believe this guy's story -- he's either a lunatic or a pathological liar," says an SEC insider.
"But the fact is, with an initial investment of only $800, in two weeks' time he had a portfolio valued at over $350 million. Every trade he made capitalized on unexpected business developments, which simply can't be pure luck.
"The only way he could pull it off is with illegal inside information. He's going to sit in a jail cell on Rikers Island until he agrees to give up his sources."
The past year of nose-diving stock prices has left most investors crying in their beer. So when Carlssin made a flurry of 126 high-risk trades and came out the winner every time, it raised the eyebrows of Wall Street watchdogs.
"If a company's stock rose due to a merger or technological breakthrough that was supposed to be secret, Mr. Carlssin somehow knew about it in advance," says the SEC source close to the hush-hush, ongoing investigation.
When investigators hauled Carlssin in for questioning, they got more than they bargained for: A mind-boggling four-hour confession.
Carlssin declared that he had traveled back in time from over 200 years in the future, when it is common knowledge that our era experienced one of the worst stock plunges in history. Yet anyone armed with knowledge of the handful of stocks destined to go through the roof could make a fortune.
"It was just too tempting to resist," Carlssin allegedly said in his videotaped confession. "I had planned to make it look natural, you know, lose a little here and there so it doesn't look too perfect. But I just got caught in the moment."
In a bid for leniency, Carlssin has reportedly offered to divulge "historical facts" such as the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden and a cure for AIDS.
All he wants is to be allowed to return to the future in his "time craft."
However, he refuses to reveal the location of the machine or discuss how it works, supposedly out of fear the technology could "fall into the wrong hands."
Officials are quite confident the "time-traveler's" claims are bogus. Yet the SEC source admits, "No one can find any record of any Andrew Carlssin existing anywhere before December 2002."
Weekly World News will continue to follow this story as it unfolds. Keep watching for further developments.
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Re: Just received one of these last night...
A friend of mine showed that article to me, all I could say at the time was "Wow, I'm glad to see that humans survive that long."
I'd sooner believe this guys story than Robert's, at least this guy had an uncanny capability of predicting the future of the stock market, if he wasn't an inside trader, and there is no record of him existing before 2002. All Robert has shown is the fact that he is either off his rocker, or really smart about avoiding the feds and local police by making himself look like a nutcase so well that the judge will throw out all his other transgressions since he is obviously a few marbles short of a full sack.
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Re: Just received one of these last night...
More to the point, the best response I heard to this story was: "Hmm. If he could travel back in time and use knowledge from the future for insider trading, why would he ever bother to come back in the middle of a recession? Wouldn't he come back during the boom years when he could have made a killing and no one would have noticed?"
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Re: Just received one of these last night...
True, (and I never said I believed the story, just that it is more plausable than Robert's,) but a better question I've always asked is "If he came from 250 years in the future, only to be scooped up by the SEC in the past for insider trading, wouldn't his research on the past in the future reveal that he would be caught, arrested, and spend the rest of his life in the past?"
I mean, if you are researching the stock market news of the past, wouldn't you find a story about yourself being arrested, and decide not to do it, or is the fact that you found an article about yourself in the past grounds that you must do it, otherwise a paradox will result and you will destroy the fabric of time?
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