How to Spot a Psychopath

I received this yesterday:

From: [redacted]
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2012 20:49:46 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dan's Data Page

Hello Dan,

I came across your website, dansdata.com, this evening. I have been considering doing something like this for awhile. I was wondering if you would be willing to share with me how succesful it has been? I am trying to save enough money and invest it so I can live off of dividend payouts. My goal is to be able to be home with my family as much as possible. I have a target of atleast 100k and have managed to to save about 40k on my own thus far. It will takes years however to complete my goal on my own. I need a way to boost my savings. Please help.

Thanks,
[name redacted]

I always wonder how these people come to e-mail me. I've had two this week. I suppose they find my dansdata.com contact-and-donation page, which is titled "Give Dan Money For No Very Good Reason!", and... that's all they read, before clicking the e-mail link.

Because otherwise, they'd notice that people occasionally drop a buck or two in my tip jar because I, you know, wrote a load of stuff, on a very wide range of subjects.

Perhaps I've got this guy all wrong, and what he wants to do is start a Web site and slog away at it for a decade and make money that way. I suspect, however, that he, like the others who more clearly express their desire that I share my money-making secrets, just reckons I must be some kind of expert Internet panhandler. The contact/donation page scores really high in a Google search for "give me money"; I think a search like that is usually where these people come from.

When one of these correspondents seems to have two brain cells to rub together I direct them to my reply to this letter, in which I explain why people occasionally give me money. But all you really need to do is actually read the donation page, on which can be found subtle hints that it is not quite the only page on Dan's Data.

It'd make more sense if these e-mails were widely-copied scattershot spam, but they never seem to be. (Or, at least, Googling a string from them never turns up copies elsewhere.) Even the ones that include a sob story and ask me to send some of my presumed riches to them on account of how their son only has a burlap sack full of leaves for a body, or something, appear to have been typed in by an actual human and sent to only a few recipients, and quite possibly only to me.

I suppose sending spur-of-the-moment e-mails to someone who might know about getting strangers to send you money for nothing is a better wealth-generation strategy than just visualising money really hard and waiting for your Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet to kick in.

I think you'd probably do better by just sending out PayPal money requests at random, though.

(The people I get PayPal money requests from almost certainly find me via the contact/donation page, too. Only seldom does someone really put in some effort.)