Too Bad

There’s been a news item swirling around the Internet for the past week about a new venture that combines extreme sports with big game hunting for the chance to do something more disturbing than most people will ever imagine: pirate-hunting cruises off the horn of Africa. The story goes that a group of Russian entrepreneurs got their hands on an unwanted cruise ship, outfitted it with lots of extra lights to make it easier to locate at night, and hired a bunch of ex-special forces troops to be the security detachment. They will then take passengers on a cruise up and down the Somali coast at about 5 knots, trolling for pirates. To make this more interesting, passengers will have the option of renting a variety of firearms by the day, with ammo provided at cut-rate prices. They promise that the ship will be attacked by pirates, or your money back. Alas, if only it were true…

Even a quick glance over the web site put up by this alleged business should tell the reader that there’s something fishy going on. There’s no contact information, no way to communicate with the “company” whose site you’ve located, and no way to order anything from them. In fact, there’s no information about the company, the people behind it, or even the boat you’re going to be riding on. There are also a few other minor points – the assault rifle ammunition is priced at less than 20% of what actual ammo for those weapons would cost, and the .50 caliber ammo is priced at less than 10% of what that costs; the legality of such a venture is highly questionable; how on Earth would they get financing for this, let alone insurance? – but none of these are quite as immediate as the question of who in their right mind would take these chances with either pirates attacking an un-armored, unprotected target like a cruise ship, or a bunch of un-trained civilians with automatic weapons and grenade launchers running around on their boat?

Some of you may remember a similar Internet business hoax from a few years ago, called Penguin Warehouse, which also purported to be an actual online business selling live penguins direct from Antarctica (and other points south where they have penguins) but was actually just an exercise in website design. Here again, the hoax became obvious when you realized that there was no way to contact the company or give them money, which would rather defeat the purpose of having an e-commerce site, if you think about it. The fact that the United States and most other countries have strict laws about importing exotic animals and owning one, none of which were even referenced by this site, would just have been confirmation. Which didn’t keep thousands of people from being disappointed when they realized this site was a hoax…

Personally, I’ve always been amazed that someone doesn’t try using sites like these as part of an Internet scam, like the famous (I hope!) Nigerian bank scams. All you’d need would be an off-shore account and a PayPal set-up, and you could easily take “deposits” for pirate-hunting cruises, live penguins, or any number of other things that people would be so delighted by that it wouldn’t occur to them to doubt the legitimacy of the company until it was too late. Of course, there are a lot of Internet scams that function exactly that way already, and it’s probably only because the Nigerians don’t really understand the American mentality that we haven’t seen more of this sort of cyber-crime. Which means that as soon as this story percolates to some of the seamier parts of the Internet, we probably WILL start getting spam about pirate-hunting cruise offers…

Maybe I’ll invest in some of that new anti-spam software – or even the companies that make it. From where I’m sitting, it looks like the demand is about to pick up…