In a follow up from yesterday, I was sent another email from the same source. The tile of the message was, "A lad named E. Mandala" which I've set the title of this puzzle to. Can you help me make sense of the message below? I noticed that all of his words are palindromes, but what do those numbers mean? How do they correlate to the encrypted message?
I'm a fool; aloof am I
In words, drown I
Is it I? It is I!Name not one man.
O, stone, be not so
I did, did I?33
99
313
585
717
7447
+-+-+Dhmx Pau Eau Qutc, O zxayz znmz eua chxh mgrh zu joiovnhx znoy shyymlh yaiihyykarre. Vrhmyh yhtj zcu natjxhj kuaxzhht ayj my yuut my vuyyogrh zu se chyzhxt atout miiuatz yu znmz o imt qhhv se iuatzxe ymkh kxus se hbor atirh mlmot. Eua corr gh iusvhtymzhj av zu kobh sorrout ayj.
O thhj euax nhrv,
Euax kxhotj,
Mjhjmeu
Vxotih uk Tolhxom
Hint:
Since the message itself has been decoded, here is a hint on how to solve it. You should take +-+-+ literally.
Answer
I decode the letter as
Dear Juo Yuo Konw, I trust that you were able to dicipher this message successfully. Please send two hundred fourteen usd as soon as possible to my western union account so that i can keep my country safe from my evil uncle again. You will be compensated up to five million usd.
I need your help,
Your freind,
Adedayo
Prince of Nigeria
In my solution I can't see any reference to palindromes and I can't explain the given numbers. First I use
Rot20 (i.e. a->u, b->v, g->a etc.).
Then the text is readable yet. After that I
swap some characters again: a->#, g->a, f->g, x->d, e->f, b->e, #->b
Alternatively you can decrypt in one step by using following table
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
UVWDYZBECDFGAHIJKLMNOPQRST
Note thatD
appears twice.
OP Edit:
To solve this puzzle, you can also do the following:
You should notice that the two stanzas and the numbers are both palindromes, and they both contain six of them each. This is the displacement you need to know for the Caesar cipher. (I did an offset of six, but I guess it went the other way, hence the shift of 20).You should then follow the operator's directions, to end up with a number of 7134, which you should translate to the letters gacd. This is the keyword shift.
Finally, you'll arrive at the answer, where instead of starting with Dear, it'll be Xear (our friend from Nigeria's native language isn't English)
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