Emails from cranks?

[Katrina Gulliver]

I'm sure most of you have at some time or another got an odd email to your university address. Often from someone claiming they have invented/discovered something that the establishment is trying to "silence" them about. (For years I got messages from one guy with a particular theory about the authorship of Shakespeare).

Just this week I got one from a guy who is full conspiracy theory. He even claims the government is trying to get him, with "attempts on my life included Neurotoxin attack at my home in San Jose, CA"...

Did anyone else hear from this person?

[AJ_Katz]

Did anyone else hear from this person?

No, but that's a good question.  The scammers are getting more and more elaborate.  I've had emails that look like they're coming from my dept. head, mentioning relevant things from his research, and asking me to do him a favor of going to buy a gift card for someone in the department because something important happened.  I'll respond and ask if we can talk on the phone and he'll say he's in a meeting of a relevant stakeholder group at the time, so he can't talk.  I almost fell for this one because the relevant facts were so close to being true.  Although the author's syntax and grammar were fraught with errors, it's not unusual for my dept. head to have such egregious errors, so I just chalked it up to hu's usual oversights.  Eventually I texted my head to get verification, only to find out it was a sham...  so I got the fun pleasure of responding to the scammer several times with, "okay, I sent the gift card, did you get it yet?"

[Katrina Gulliver]

Oh I've had those phishing messages, purportedly from the Dean, asking for "help" with something. The from field is of course j842q3420@gmail, not the Dean's actual email.

But the cranks I'm talking about don't seem to be scammers (or if they are, the con is far less obvious). They typically don't ask for anything beyond getting "the word out" about whatever their conspiracy theory is.

[pigou]

I've gotten emails from someone who sends me links to his hours-long YouTube videos about how overpopulation is the primary driver of climate change and societal ills. He even has a website right out of the 90s with flashing animations and all. He got annoyed that I wouldn't schedule "a few hours" with him to discuss his ideas. I guess everyone needs a hobby. I haven't received any death threats from cranks yet, so it's not as bad as what other colleagues are getting. A clear sign that I'm not as widely read as they are, alas...

I try and empathize, because it's got to be frustrating if you (think you) have a light bulb moment and nobody's engaging with you on it. I've had moments like that myself, but my academic affiliation allows me to write an op-ed (or even a paper). Without that signal of credibility, I'd just have been a crank ranting on Twitter, too.

[Puget]

I've occasionally gotten such emails from individuals who are clearly psychotic. I'm in psych/neuro, so sometimes people go looking for faculty email addresses hoping someone can help prove their delusions of mind control, etc. One even included images of his CT scans. I never reply, as engaging is unlikely to help the person and may further feed their delusions.

I also occasionally get emails, usually from  lay people in eastern Europe for some reason, who have some theory about psychology that they want me to "collaborate" with them to spread. Often, but not alway, this theory involves applying something about Freud to some historical figure, often Hitler. I'm not sure if these people are actively delusional or just hobbyists with a very outdated/incorrect  understanding of psychology as a field, but I likewise simply delate these.

[ergative]

I once got a letter published in The New Yorker. Someone looked at the town under my attribution, inferred that I worked at the university in that town, and sent a physical essay, on paper!, that he had written about the origins of racism or something. It was addressed to [Ergative, Big University, Town, State], so the university mailroom did itself proud in getting it to my mailbox.

To be fair, I did have a public website at the university, and it's the first thing that comes up if you google my name and the town name, so it's not deeply creepy that he found me, but there were still a non-trivial number of steps involved in getting from the letters page to my office.

[downer]

I get a variety of odd emails, and I guess I'd call some of them as being from cranks. But I don't really think of people with paranoid fantasies as cranks. I think of them as people with mental illnesses.

What is a crank? Someone who peddles their wacko theories and who is not interested in taking into account all the evidence against their theories.

Maybe it is hard to distinguish between cranks and people with paranoid fantasies, especially from their emails.

I'm more inclined to classify people who advocate for strange religiously-informed theories as cranks.

[RatGuy]

I once got an email from the parent of a former student. She was involved in Turning Point, and she had requested that I forward her information on my colleagues' plans for "Lefist Insurrections." I think she thought I was some oppressed whistleblower.

And much more recently, I received an email

You may have seen on NBC news concerning the implantable RFID microchip that some people are getting put in their hand to make purchases, but did you know this microchip matches perfectly with prophecy in the Bible? You may have heard of the legendary number "666" that people have been speculating for possibly thousands of years on what it actually means. This article shares something I haven't seen before, and I don't think there could be any better explanation for what it means to calculate 666. This is no hoax. Very fascinating stuff!

In my Fora inbox. Anyone else get that? I expected there to be a lot of snarky comments that day, but maybe I was singled out.

[apl68]

Our library occasionally gets self-published books mailed to us on spec as gifts to add to our collection.  Some of it is fiction or children's books.  Some of it is cranky-looking nonfiction.  I figure that the people sending it to us must really be casting their net wide--and spending an awful lot of money--if a library as small and obscure as ours is being favored with a copy.  I can only imagine how much of this stuff big-city and university libraries must receive. 

A certain well-known alternative religion, founded by a 1930s pulp science fiction writer, has on several occasions sent us whole boxes of their sacred texts, which are meant to supersede earlier editions.  It's a little reminiscent of how Soviet libraries would receive newly edited reference works to erase the existence of some national figure who had fallen from favor.  A few years ago they also mailed us vast numbers of collections of Illustrious Founder's prolific pulp stories in assorted genres to put on our shelves.  Have no idea why they saw fit to spend all the money it took to do that. 

The rest of the cranks are nobody you're likely to have heard of.  In recent years we've been getting fewer of them.  I guess the crank self-publishers have mostly become computer literate enough to try print-on-demand instead.

[Katrina Gulliver]

In my Fora inbox.

I've never received spam in my fora PM box. Wow.

[mamselle]

I once got an email from the parent of a former student. She was involved in Turning Point, and she had requested that I forward her information on my colleagues' plans for "Lefist Insurrections." I think she thought I was some oppressed whistleblower.

And much more recently, I received an email

You may have seen on NBC news concerning the implantable RFID microchip that some people are getting put in their hand to make purchases, but did you know this microchip matches perfectly with prophecy in the Bible? You may have heard of the legendary number "666" that people have been speculating for possibly thousands of years on what it actually means. This article shares something I haven't seen before, and I don't think there could be any better explanation for what it means to calculate 666. This is no hoax. Very fascinating stuff!

In my Fora inbox. Anyone else get that? I expected there to be a lot of snarky comments that day, but maybe I was singled out.

We were just discussing that on another thread ( ...or was that your post?)

People can google into forum posts--i.e., key word matches in a post show up in Google searches--so maybe that's the tie-in?

M.

[Katrina Gulliver]

People can google into forum posts--i.e., key word matches in a post show up in Google searches--so maybe that's the tie-in?

Don't they have to join the fora to be able to send another member a PM?

[Parasaurolophus]

Don't they have to join the fora to be able to send another member a PM?

Yes.

Spam accounts do occasionally manage to get through the approval process. When that happens, we pretty much only catch them once they post. But if you're received a spam PM, it's worth letting us know so that we can take appropriate action.

[polly_mer]

I get far fewer crank emails now that my professional email is not publicly available through my non-academic employer.  However, I get cranks in person at certain conferences.

I received many more crank emails when I gave public science outreach shows and published my academic email that was already public.

[aside]

I once had a fellow send me the script for a musical he had written.  He just wanted me to write the music for it.