Chess

In accordance with my Russian genes, I started to play competitive chess in 10th grade. My school had a chess team, and since membership was low, we were heavily subsidized to go to tournaments. To practice, I played a lot of chess on Yahoo!. One day, after playing a few games (and getting crushed) against a random player, we started talking and sent instant messages back and forth to each other over the next few days. He told me that he was a fourteen year old American named Murphy living in France and that he played competitively in European tournaments and did very well (chess tournaments have fairly substantial cash prizes for the winners). I never learned his last name but I believed him simply because he was an exceptional chess player. I watched him play at least thirty games and he never lost.

I’d been watching Murphy play chess and playing chess with him for a few hours a day for about a week when he simply disappeared. A few days later, he sent me an instant message and said that he fell on a knife and was hospitalized. A few days after that, he signed on and I asked him how he was feeling, only to receive a response in French. With the help of Babelfish, I learned that I was talking to Murphy’s French brother and that Murphy had died from his wound.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. A few days afterwards, a person identifying himself as Murphy’s father signed on and, in a mixture of French and English, explained that Murphy did not have any friends in school and that, on his deathbed, he said that he had made a friend online (me) and willed me a million euros. His father proceeded to request that I come to France for Murphy’s funeral, which I denied; after all, I didn’t know Murphy very well. So, in what probably remains the strangest thing that I have ever done online, we had a wake over instant messenger. Since then, no one has ever signed onto that screen name. Needless to say, I never received the million dollars, but it seems far too elaborate to be a scam.