Sophisticated Phishing?

Carmen

(Image from Wikipedia)

Phishers may be getting more sophisticated. A few days ago, I received the following email from a certain "Carmen":

I was reading "An Insightful Use of Reader-Response Literary Theory" and had a comment. Hmm, I think you might be misunderstanding Fish. His notion of interpretive communities suggests that the community creates the sole definition of a text, not a "fuller" definition.

One more thing, are you interested in getting paid to add a link on your page? Just a text link and it'd go to an education site.

I'd pay via PayPal at $100 for the link. Let me know and I can give you a call if needed.

I was somewhat taken aback by this email. While I appreciated the correction in my understanding of Stanley Fish, the offer of $100 triggered my suspicions. Nobody offers money to get a link, especially from a minor blog such as mine. But I didn't want to misjudge a helpful individual like "Carmen," so I replied:

I'm not interested in any money, but I might link to the site if I find it relevant.

In response . . . nothing, nichts, nada. "Carmen," apparently, believes that one gets what one pays for and thus wanted no free link. If it cost nothing, it meant nothing, I guess.

Was "Carmen" phishing? I can't be sure, but nobody offers to pay for a link, as I said, and she hasn't replied to my 'generous' counter offer. I therefore conducted a Google search using her full name (or the one supplied, anyway) and found only one site, a blog where she had apparently left a message in some fashion or other . . . indirectly, I take it, for the blogger herself seems to have had to post the message from "Carmen" (which strikes me as odd).

The circumstantial evidence might therefore suggest phishing, I hazard to think, but would a phisher of men like me be so knowledgeable about that Milton scholar and radical postmodernist Stanley Fish? Perhaps I should be unsurprised, however, that phishers might know about Fish . . .

Whether "Carmen," was a phisher or merely a naive, would-be letter-linker saying the darndest thing, the internet is a peculiar fishing hole . . .