A little more than seven years ago, actor/comedian Dean Cameron was on the set of a TV show called “Mr. Sterling,” and though he was in a lot of scenes, he didn’t have a lot of lines. So that allowed him to get onto the computer and check his emails.
One email caught his eye and this is how it started: “Please help me! I am the beneficiary to a fortune of 30 million dollars!!!”
“I always reply to scam emails,” Cameron said. “But I replied to this one as a version of myself that only my shrink would understand a sexually confused Florida millionaire who had a lot of cats and a house boy from the Philippines.”
Surprisingly, the scammer wrote back, and he and Cameron started a correspondence that lasted 11 months.
“What surprised me was the tenacity of both sides,” Cameron said. “He put up with all of my crap. He kept telling me that I needed to send him the money and I would write, ‘OK, I’ll send it tomorrow, but you first need to tell me what you think of my cats.” And things like that.”
Cameron even called the guy.
“We actually play the recordings during the show,” he said.
One of the quirkiest moments occurred when Cameron received an email from what seemed like another person, asking for money.
“So I wrote him an email to the guy I’d been corresponding with all these months telling him that I got an email from another guy who has the exact same problem.
“I ask him, ‘What’s that all about?’ and he replied as the other person and said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to me.'”
During the first couple of months, friends told Cameron to turn the experience into a show.
He, along with his friend Victor Isaac, started to experiment with the email transcripts.
“Things always got the best of us,” Cameron said. “Now the show’s been going seven years.”
The comedian said scamming the scammers is not a new concept.
“There are others who do this,” he said. “It’s called Scam Baiting, but I’m the only one who has a show.”
Cameron is proud that the entire script is taken verbatim from the email correspondence.
“I have had producers tell me to bump up the ending, but I like the integrity of saying this is all 100 percent true,” he said. “I did move stuff around, but there is nothing that is made up or fabricated. Fact is stranger than fiction.”
When printed, the email transcript totaled 125 pages, and Cameron had to cut it down to 25 in order to make it into a show. To do so, he recruited his friend, Paul Provencal, a stand-up comedian and producer of Showtime TV’s “The Green Room,” to help mold the show.
“It’s structured in a way of a long-form stand-up performance,” Cameron said. “I like to say it’s a 55-minute show, with 60 minutes of laughs.”
While it was easy to find things about the scame that were humorous, Cameron learned another lesson.
“We all have something we believe in that someone else thinks is complete and utter hooey,” he said. “The people to fall for these scams are not idiots. They’re doing the thing that’s best about being a human, which is trusting other humans.
“I mean, when you think about it, you and I could believe in some political thing or some religious or scientific thing that someone else knows is ridiculous,” he said. “We’re all victims of some sort of scam in our own way.”
With the “Nigerian Spam Scam Scam,” Cameron has also helped people who were victims laugh about their experience.
“One of the very first shows we did was for a group of FBI agents who specialized in con games and con artists,” he said. “After the show, a woman, whose husband had lost $300,000 to a scam, came up and talked with us and said she appreciated what we did. We have people come up to us all the time, because we don’t portray the victim as being foolish. They are trying to be good people.”
“The Nigerian Spam Scam Scam” with Dean Cameron and Victor Isaac will run through Sunday, Feb. 27, at the Egyptian Theatre, 328 Main Street. Saturday performance is 8 p.m. Sunday curtain is 6 p.m. Tickets range from $18-$25 and available by calling (435) 649-9371 or visiting www.egyptiantheatrecompany.org.