1) Quatloos, a "Cyber-Museum of Scams & Frauds" discusses a scheme involving a fictitious island nation called the Dominion of Melchizedek. From Quatloos:
The so-called Dominion of Melchizedek (hereinafter "DoM") is a fake nation which exists only in cyberspace, or in the literature and actions of the scam artists who perpetrate this fraud. There is no real Dominion of Melchizedek, but this doesn't stop the scammers from selling utterly worthless bank licenses for tens-of-thousands of dollars.
The DoM attempts to hold itself out as some sort of quasi-religious body, even to the point of having its own version of the Bible. But for all their self-righteousness, the truth is that the DoM not only commits fraud, but also materially facilitates the fraud of others by creating phony banks, stock exchanges, arbitration forums, etc., in an attempt to give some illusory legitimacy to criminals who are directly defrauding the public by way of pyramid-scheme bank debenture scams and other criminal schemes.
According to Melchizedek's Web site (which DOES EXIST), the President of the country, whose name appears below a Star of David, is a former law enforcement official from Los Angeles (he doesn't really exist, but they have a photo!).
The story rapidly gets less slightly less interesting when reality kicks in. The guys behind the Dominion are just a father-son team of felons convicted of evil doings numerous times.
The story gets more interesting again when you realize there are several fictitious island nations on the Internet. Presumably they could declare war on each other in some sort of Battlespace Involving Information.
But back to the main thing: Tlon kind of happened in 1996!
1 comment:
Melchizedek is a pretty weird/interesting biblical thing. As I recall, he's some kind of priest of some pagan god (it's rather vague) who blesses Abraham. I think there's some theory that he was a well-known character back in the day who got folded into Israelite mythology. But then there's some psalm praising a king/anointed one/"messiah," saying, maybe, that he is of the order of Melchizedek (probably "dominion" comes out of this) -- although this might just be a translation error, because the same syllables could also just mean something about a "righteous king" or something. But Christians decided this was a cryptic ref to Jesus. What ws the order of Melchizedek? No one really knew b/c it was never supposed to mean anything about Jesus, but they had a lot of ideas about it, and surely Mel was an important dude.
Just "droppin'" "knowledge"! Like Nas. He should do a book of blog entries and call it Nas'al Passages.
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