Last night I got to talk to a scammer. Good times.
A friend of mine had his gmail account compromised and used for the "London mugging" scam, where the scammer sends messages to friends and family claiming to have been mugged in a foreign country (I guess London is the typical location) and that they need money wired to get themselves back home.

Ha.

I was also watching Breaking Bad at the time. Double ha.

Here is the conversation I had with el scammerino:

7:52 PM Brian: Hey
are you there ?
7:55 PM sparx: yes. hi!
Brian: am not too good
sparx: no? what's up?
7:56 PM Brian: I'm stranded in Manila Philippines with my family
got mugged at gun point last night
scary!
7:57 PM sparx: manila? i thought you just left for puerto rico last night
Brian: No
I was hit on the head but getting better
all cash,credit card and phone was stolen
7:58 PM sparx: did they take your wheelchair? can you still move around?
7:59 PM Brian: thank God we still have our life and passport safe
8:00 PM sparx: your wheelchair though, do you still have it? do you still have the meth you smuggled in your wheelchair's frame?
Brian: our return flight leaves in few hours but having troubles sorting out the hotel bills
i need your help
sparx: if you lost my meth i'll fucking kill you
8:01 PM DO YOU HAVE THE GOODS?!
Brian: yes i need your help
8:02 PM sparx: there's still an hour until the swap. there will be $80,000 in the breifcase. take out what you need to get back, i'll consider it a loan
8:03 PM *briefcase. sorry, can't spell.. got pretty pissed when i thought you lost the product
8:04 PM still there?

The chat status went idle, which is why I tossed in the "still there?" – I was really hoping I would get to play more with my new friend. 🙁

I'm curious, what program(s) do you use for instant messaging?

Pidgin

I used to be a die-hard fan of Gaim, until it switched names and became Pidgin.. then I became a die-hard fan of Pidgin. 🙂 Why? It's open source, free, and it'll run on linux and windows.

Back when I dual-booted between linux and XP on my desktop, I was able to share the data files between the windows and linux copies of gaim. It was very nice, all settings, chat histories, etc were consistent no matter which OS I was currently using.

Gmail

I'm currently taking advantage of the chat feature within Gmail. This is about as bare-bones of a client as you can get, so there aren't any features like file transfers (yet), but, as far as I'm concerned, the convenience more than makes up for that.

Since Gmail allows me to chat through AIM, and since most of the people I talk to are either using Gmail or AIM,  I no longer need to have Pidgin or any other chat program installed on my work or home computer. I'll get the same familiar setup on just about any computer. Plus, being able to search through all of my chat logs quickly and easily makes finding forgotten info as painless as possible.

But that's me… what do you use?