Humuhumu beat me to posting this, but it's just too good to pass up:

A bemused Sven Kirsten, author of that indispensible guide to faux-Polynesian living, The Book of Tiki, recently discovered that he'd been ripped off wholesale by a con artist calling himself Haapape Tuarii, the Great Maori Magus of Polynesia, in a junk mailer entitled, The Great Tiki of Unlimited Abundance. Sven thoughtfully scanned it and posted the pages in this Tiki Central thread, so we could all share in his conflicted glee.

The mailer contains a pretty common scam of the type perfected years ago by Reverend Ike, that offers to take a mere $50 of your hard-earned cash in exchange for a magical trinket (in this case, a tiki) that will enable you to gain friends, influence people, and WIN BIG AT LOTTO! What makes this so special is that practically every single image in the mailer was lifted directly from Sven's book without so much as a how do you do.

For those familiar with the Book of Tiki, it's absolutely hilarious to see the "Magus" try to pass off an old snapshot of a waiter from the Mai Kai restaurant in Florida as himself, and a photograph purporting to show "the magic place where Haapape Tuarii practices the great ritual ceremonies of the solstice" that's actually the Shelter Isle Apartments of Arcadia, California! Better clean up good after them rituals, buddy, or the super'll keep your deposit!

As despicable as these types of scams are, the utter brazeness of the author's plagiarism and the sublimely bizarre juxtaposition of religion and Polynesian Pop, give this a surreal, prankish feel that's worthy of the Sub-geniuses. Bob would be proud!