We’ve all received one of those e-mails.

The details vary, but the template is the same: “Dear Sir (or Madam) I am the (widow, son, daughter, nephew, attorney, etc.) of the late (prime minister, treasurer, premier, president, etc.) of the (government, bank, national oil company, etc.) of (Nigeria, Columbia, Sierra Leone, etc.). I need your help.”

The missive goes on to say that a large sum of money is hung up by red tape or government shenanigans or a legal technicality. You, usually by virtue of your trustworthy American-ness, can help unfreeze this horse-choking wad of cash, for which you shall receive handsome remuneration for your modicum of inconvenience.

All you need do is send a small sum of good-faith money to pay off a banker, government official or customs agent and get the money transferred right into your bank account.

Keep this matter confidential, you are urged. There is a whiff of illegality about the transaction. There is the lure of an almost unimaginable windfall.

Who would fall for such a load of Gold Coast guano, you ask? Apparently lots of your friends and neighbors. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so popular, would it? Nigerian officials have a name for it: 4-1-9 Advance Fee Fraud, the three digits being the law enforcement code heading the crime falls under.

Dean Cameron’s mission is to scam the scammers.

“The Nigerian Spam Scam Scam,” which he presented last week at the Napa Valley Opera House, is part reality show, part candid camera, part “Sting,” part “Borat” and part “Monty Python.” After all, the word “spam” (as it’s used online) refers to the old Python bit about the restaurant where every dish served comes with Spam, the processed meat product.

The two-man show documents Cameron’s purported nine-month correspondence with a Nigerian confidence man who tried to pass himself off as an oppressed widow and her son.  Responding to a spam e-mail with the cryptic query, “Got toast?” Cameron gets a reply. The game begins.

During the correspondence Cameron, a professional actor, adopted the persona of a wealthy, sexually ambiguous eccentric who shares his Florida estate with a houseboy and two cats, Mr. Snickers and Jo-Jo the Dancing Clown. Cameron also defers to his attorney from time to time, a Mr. Perry Mason.

Victor Issac plays the African con man who persists in the face of Cameron’s taunting obfuscation and deliberate misunderstanding. Issac turned in an outstanding performance Friday night. He plays the straight man to Cameron’s jester, but steals the show with his dynamic portrayal of the scammer portraying the fictitious widow and son.

The laughs come thick and fast at the con man’s expense but the joke begins to wear a little thin after a while. The scammer begins to look like an idiot for persisting in the face of Cameron’s deliberate mockery. One would think he would get clued in, abandon this wisecracking mark and look for another, more naïve victim. At one point he actually asks Cameron why he is tormenting him. Why do you think, Poindexter?

But the scammer — the Nigerian scammer, that is, for both men are running scams now — persists. He tries to talk Cameron into going to Amsterdam and contacting an associate there. There are stories that people who have fallen for this ploy have been kidnapped for ransom and some have disappeared.

Cameron’s goal is to get the con man to send him money, even if it’s just $1. Does he succeed? You’ll have to see the show to find out.

“Scam” is a clever, at times hilarious show with a very real point to ponder. The Internet has drastically shrunk the world and introduced us all to a very real, very fluid unreality called cyberspace — a term that comes from a work of fiction, by the way — where an individual can adopt many deceitful identities.

We howl at Cameron’s deliberate malapropisms — “I want to rectum-fy my mistake.” — with the lurking awareness that it’s easy to lose things in the unreal vacuum of this new frontier. Especially things like identity, innocence and very real, very sizeable quantities of cold, hard cash.