GoRK's Journal: Dimensional Warp Generator Needed

Generally the message begins something like this:

Hello,

I'm a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.

What follows is generally a way to contact the spammer either by email, postal mail, fax, or in-person meeting.

I have gotten an increasing number of these lately in various forms. I told my friends about them because they were so funny, and everyone has been forwarding me different forms of the message for a couple weeks. I have amassed quite a few different versions now, but I can't figure out what the hell the scam is. Does anyone know? Apparently this message has been going around for a number of years, but I haven't been able to find anything about it. I thought snopes would have had something, but they are no help.

The only thing I can think of is that some fool might get excited about it and, believing that such a device actually exists, attempt to contact the spammer to purchase some advanced technology at which point a regular con ensues. Ie. money given up front; scammer run away.

The other side of the coin is to theorize like this:

If time travel is to ever exist, then the likelyhood that someone will get stuck in the past at some point is almost certainly approaching a 100% probability. Now, if this were the case, then a person's best course of action would be to contact the largest number of people in the most historically inconspicuous manner possible. I think that spamming millions of people through e-mail is definately the right way to go about finding a replacement device of some sort. The possibility (however small) that this whole thing is actually true does actually exist! Poor guy. What a terrible time to be stuck in...