My cousin told me this story about one of her friend's friends who is a Perl developer... I think his name was Fred.

Anyway, one day Fred saw this advertisement for Perl developers at comp.lang.perl. The job was supposed to be in Hong Kong, where this 'multimedia' company was looking for '15 talented CGI developers who speak excellent engrish', and was offering $75,000 (US) a year.

Fred couldn't believe his eyes. He had always wanted to see Hong Kong. He imagined himself in exotic Hong Kong, hacking away at thoroughly-tested and well-designed CGI::Application modules during the day while spending the evenings with women who might not mind the fact that he was a big damned geek quite so much. Fred picked up the phone with a 'recruiter', and after a few phone-screenings and an on-line certification test he found himself with a ticket to Hong Kong!

After a few weeks he gets to HK, where he is met by the 'recruiter' who asks him to take a ride in a boat. Fred and the 'recruiter' pull into the dock in front of a mysterious-looking building. Fred starts to to become suspicous because there are so few other building in the vicinity, and because this area didn't look the HK he'd seen in pictures at all. When he asked the 'recruiter' what was going on, the recruiter explained that the chef was making dim-sum for dinner that evening and that Fred had best hurry in 'before the other geeks get it all.'

After Fred goes in, he soon realized that this 'multimedia' company wasn't a multimedia company at all, but a bunch of SPAMMERS! That, and he wasn't even in Hong Kong anymore, but the People's Republic of China!!!!

The spam-gang forced him work 14 hours a day, writing scripts that would harvest email address from web pages, starting DOS attacks on spam black-list servers, creating random subject lines, and making 'punch-the-monkey'-style Flash animations. They DID pay him $75,000 a year, as agreed, but deducted food, rent and computer-time until he was left with about fifty dollars a week, which Fred always blew on colas and tobacco.

He was forced to live in a dormitory-style room with three other geeks, one of whom wasn't really even a Perl developer, but was actually a VB developer who just lied on his resume. He didn't even know to find how many elements were in an array. The VB-guy ended up getting screamed at and beaten by the spam-gangers, until a few weeks went by and they moved him into management.

Overall, Fred found the situation to be pretty intolerable, even though the gang had bunches of bootleg anime DVDs that they could watch in the evenings, and not too unlike being back in college. He had to escape.

Nearby was a building from which boats left every evening. It turned out to be the building in which 'Marvel HeroClix' figures were painted, so Fred snuck in to it early in the morning and packed himself into a crate full of 'Clix stuff. About two weeks later, the crate was opened and Fred found himself in a 'Hobbytown U.S.A.' in Texas.

Fred had to undergo several weeks worth of psychotherapy after being forced to spam for a pittance, but he's supposed to be okay, nowadays, and he now has some government job, from what I understand.

I don't know if this story is really true or not, but my cousin and her friend swear that it is, and there's a part of me that believes it. ;)