British man gets revenge on internet scammer by texting him 30,000 words from Shakespeare's work

A British man is conducting a master class in revenge-trolling after he got ripped off by an internet seller. Twenty-four-year-old Edd Joseph was obviously mad when he paid for a PlayStation 3 console on Gumtree (the British version of Craigslist) and the seller didn't deliver. So, since he had the vendor's cellphone number, he has been bombarding it with 30,000 of Shakespeare's words via text message.

Joseph doesn't write out all of these words himself — he copies and pastes them from his browser in full. What makes the plan so mischievously annoying is that the scammer's phone, like most phones, can only receive 160-character messages at a time, thus resulting in thousands of consecutive texts.

The average Shakespeare work clocks in at 22,600 words and is delivered in nearly 800 texts to Joseph's enemy's phone. In total, so far he's sent 17,424 texts from dozens of plays, including Othello and Hamlet.

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The obviously annoyed scammer has sent him some "abusive messages" to stop. "His phone must have been going off pretty constantly for hours," reckons Joseph, adding that he's not going to stop anytime soon. "I'm going to keep doing it. If nothing else I'm sharing a little bit of culture with someone who probably doesn't have much experience of it."