Here’s one that has really gotten up my ass lately. (And though I’ve never been there myself, judging from the condition of former tenants, you do not want to go there. And neither should we.)

So you check your mailbox, and among the bills, DVDs from NetFlix and landscaping company fliers illicitly added to the box by an employee of the company, are any number of loan solicitations; credit cards, home equity, major-organ-as-collateral, you name it. You sort them into the “shred” pile, but one or more of them seem to contain actual credit cards. “What the fuck,” you say to yourself, “are these idiots sending me credit cards for? I don’t bank with these assholes. I have half a mind to call them up and scream at their front-line phone drones.” You rip open the envelope and out falls….a fake credit card, in the name of John Smith, with a credit card number of 0000-0000-0000-0000, and a letter offering to hook you up with one of their real, usurious credit cards.

Sometimes the accompanying letter isn’t even about credit cards. It may be about home equity lines of credit, or wholesale office supplies. I even got one from Geico Insurance: it presented itself as a “Quick Quote Card”. Oh, thank God! Without that card, how ever would I manage to get an insurance quote from an insurance company? Thanks, Mister Lizard!

Now, it should be painfully obvious what the intended function of these kredit kards (i.e., fake credit cards, like spelling “crab” with a “K”) is. They are not a visual aid to show the prospective customer what a credit card looks like. Say what you will about the intelligence of the average mailing-address holder in this country, I think most of them know a credit card when they see one. No, the sole reason that companies insert these little decoys into their mass mailings is to keep the recipient from reflexively tossing (or hopefully shredding) the damn thing on sight, unopened. You feel that rectilinear zone of resistance through the thin paper skin of the envelope, and you’re hosed; you have to open it. Even if your shredder is capable of chewing the kard up along with rest of the envelope’s contents, you have to look to make sure. Maybe an identity thief applied for a credit card in your name and the company sent it to the correct address; maybe your significant other is doing business with this lender and forgot to tell you; maybe the company in question really did send you a credit card, unsolicited, and now you have to call up to cancel the card and question the lineage of the operator who has the misfortune to answer your call. But the one thing you can’t do is ignore it.

And that is the point at which they try to exploit you, hoping that radon gas or stray EMR or diesel fumes from a passing truck will momentarily impair your judgement, causing you to say to yourself, “why, come to think of it, I would like a $50,000.00 line of credit at 22% interest!”

I’m sure the large lenders and other companies using this tactic researched it thoroughly in advance, asking focus groups of consumers whether they would be more or less likely to open an envelope if it appeared to contain a credit-card-sized object. Pity they probably failed to ask the next logical question: whether consumers receiving such a letter, upon discovering that it was a fake, would be more or less likely to want to burn down the houses where the CEOs of the companies in question reside, murder their families, and discard the bodies in shallow bogs where they would be gnawed on by marsh rats and used as bluebottle fly hatcheries.

I wish I had the time, energy and cojones to send back one of their postage paid “reply-to” envelopes filled with a fine white powder and a credit-card-sized note reading “WEAPONIZED ANTHRAX”. Then, when Homeland Security interrogators asked me why I had done such a thing, I would tell them that I had only intended to let the company know I was not interested in availing myself of their generous offer, but was afraid they would ignore the letter without something else enclosed to peak their interest.