Thai: A man named Dhipyamongkol Jatukamramthep while at Singapore's Golden Mile one Sunday evening hears of Singaporeans drinking coffee and using fly as garnish. Gears churn and Jatukamramthep decides this is a marketable commodity back in Chiang Mai. Uses contacts at Bangkok Post to create media hype about to-die-for new drink. Meanwhile enlists PR outfit belonging to a subsidiary company of Thaksin Shinawatra to organise a launch bash in Phuket. Engages cannery based in Batam owned by a Singapore cannery tycoon. Jatukamramthep ensures that the brand name is a secret. On gala launch night he unveils the beverage, a giant can surrounded by dancers prancing around in feathers and glitter. He's picked a winner - the name of the new drink is Muay Fly.
Nigerian scamster: Sends out about 679,000 copies of an email whose contents are:
Dear xxyyzz,
In view of my quest for assistance based on mutual understanding and willingness of a kind heart to help, I seek for your attention to my plight.
I am an entrepreneur and family member to Miriam Abacha (Nee Usman) the wife to General Sani Abacha and my name is Usman Muazu. I was working in one of the Nigerian missions abroad as a co-diplomat until I decided to relocate back to Nigeria as a self-businessman.
In brief, General Sanni Abacha was our former head of state who died suddenly on Monday 8th of June 1998. It was determined thereafter by the Nigerian Secret Service that Gen Abacha's death was caused not, as was widely and incorrectly reported, due to an overindulgence in the physical arts but by an apparently inconspicuous cup of coffee that was attended to by a suspicious buzzing noise.
Upon the sudden and tragic death of this man, the new civilian administration started an intensive exercise to freeze all Nigerian coffee accounts both home and abroad as he was confirmed to have diverted a certain percentage of the coffee proceeds to his numerous accounts.
However, there happens to be the sum of US$32,500,000.00 (Thirty two Million, five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars Only) in coffee vouchers hidden away in a Company Security Account Deposit (CSAD) being known only by Mrs. Abacha and I.
It is therefore on this note that Mrs. Miriam Abacha is secretly looking for a trustworthy and understanding person who will help to accommodate and safeguard this coffee fund in his account to save them from the calamities of the present clamp down on the Abacha’s family.
Yours faithfully
Usman Muazu
Indonesian (from the Malukus): Accuses Jakarta of having extracted a fly from a particularly vile ointment and then of having flung it into a local coffee. About 5,000 parang-wielding Malukans gather on the beach and vow death to the perpetrators.
The man who discovered the fly announces that "the dirty hand of Megawati is quite evident". Unbeknownst to him, an intrepid reporter of the Far Eastern Economic Review is hiding in the padi fields nearby and hears all. In the next issue of the journal, much of the unrest between Muslims and Christians on Ambon is portrayed as a direct result of government policies of ethnic migration of flies and provocation of coffee traders.
Megawati bans the Review. So does Singapore (which forgot that it had done so already over the hoo-haa about Thai royalty. Jatukamramthep meanwhile is laughing all the way to the bank but no-one notices).
It takes a month before Morgan Stanley parachutes a team of analysts into West Kalimantan (on Borneo Island). They defuse clashes between the native Dayaks and Madurese migrants by offering everyone steaming mugs of fly-riddled coffee. "It has a similar smell of provocation," shout the Malukans, but no-one is listening. The new settlers generally receive better treatment than the Dayaks, and eventually re-colonise the archipelago.
