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Sweet Revenge On Nigerian Scammers
davesag writes "I just came across this fine site, 419Eater, wherin people counter scam the Nigerian 419 scammers that have been plaguing our spam filters for the past few years. The UK paper The Guardian is also running a fine article on this site. The site author, and several other contributors, have taken to responding to the scammers, using obviously fake names and so forth, and then string the scammer along for as long as possible. In many cases they get the scammer to pose for a photograph! Amazingly the scammers are just as gullible and greedy as their typical victims, and fall for the most obvious ruses hook, line, and sinker. 419eater welcomes contributors, so if you ever wanted to get your sweet revenge on these low-lives, here's a channel for you. The 419 refers to the section of the Nigerian criminal code under which such scams fall." We've linked to a few such fraud-baiters before, though few with as amusing a photograph.
Having conned some con artists, myself (in other contexts), I am always amazed at how blind they are to the game. I mean, isn't it cliche that those who can't be trusted are always suspicious, because they expect the world to have motives like they do?
I once conned someone ten minutes after he conned me, in exactly the same way, to teach him a lesson, and he fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
Apparently the cartoons of my youth were right -- evil defeats itself through fatal flaws of its own design.
Lack of vision: courtesy of greed.
I wonder how far you could get them to go. If you sent one of the scammers a plane ticket to the US, would they come? With a little bit of work and a few hundred dollars, you could probably put them in a US jail.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well not really. If 1000 take 2 minutes to send a fake reply, that means a lot more work for the fraudster. How can they easily tell who's the hoax and who's the genuine victim, Agreed, you'd have to be by far the bluntest tool in the box to fall for this kind of scam, but anyone who tolerates or accepts this kind of crime has a fairly odd outlook on the world.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Well laid out and commented - with a different set of links.
Even if you do the simplest of counter-scam responses, you make spammers' lives that much harder.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Just here. They have managed to pull some pretty funny cons on those people, but I personally don't like the way they finish them. Check out yourselves and judge. They even have a guy who supposedly works for the scammers telling his story (in pretty bad English, but oh well...)
R.I regularly respond to spam. Then when they come calling I ask all sorts of sensible questions just like I was really interested. I try to lead them along for as long a period of time as possible.
Then just when they think they have me, I say: "This is great. I think I am going to have to get one of these. Unfortunately, I am going to buy one from [competitor] instead." They of course, ask why and I tell them I don't do business with spammers and I've just been stringing them along.
Boy do they get pissed. The responses are just classic. (Wish I had recorded them.)
The only way to beat spam is to make it unprofitable. Filtering it out will not work since there is always a percentage of people without filters and spam basically costs the spammers nothing. But by stringing them along such as this, it costs them time and money -- it makes spam unprofitable. Just think -- if 1/2 of 1% of the people that spammer's spammed wasted 10 minutes of a spammer's time and the spammer sent out 30 million e-mails, that would equate to 1,500,000 wasted minutes the spammer would have to spend.
It is awfully hard to waste 1,500,000 minutes and stay in business.
Nonsense, if yu read this story. Note that the scammer edited the picture and pasted some unknown's head on there. If these people would be using puppets all the time, they would not care for this.
Written at this Slackers Guild article.
Shameless plug, but I'm proud.
R Nigerians really the ones behind the Nigerian scams? I was always under the impression that it was organized crime from another part of the world.
I propose a revised version of the Turing Test designed to wipe out Nigerian scammers.
A program (preferrably written in Perl) will parse the Nigerian scammers letter, and automatically generate a response, leading the scammer into a web that will eventually entagle him and send him to the slammer.
Since the average Nigerian scammer seems a bit dumb to begin with, this might be a suitable stepping stone for the artificial intelligence community to consider.
The idea of poisoning the spam return channels is fundamentally a good one, but I think it would require serious professional commitment to make it work. Remember this is a divide-by-zero war--at least in the spammers imagination. Sending out another 10 million spams means nothing to them, since they fantacize they are dividing by zero.
For example, imagine you set up an spam auto-reply system to send poison replies to the spammers. All you have done is escalate one more level. The spammers would have at least two obvious counterattacks. They would try to identify the poisoned email addresses and actually remove them from their spam databases, and they would try to add a level of detect-real-human software for their spam replies. And remember that these guys are already experts at trying to beat those systems.
By extension, and for the same reason, playing games with the Nigerian 419 spammers is NOT a fun game, and they are NOT fooled. It is possible that they do have a front man who is stupid enough to be fooled, but in reality, their are some clever masterminds behind this stuff, they instantly detect any game playing, and if they invest 10 cents of their time in playing along with the game, they have some reason for it. You might think it is a game to try to photograph their front man doing a chicken dance, but meanwhile a whole team of them might be searching for your hiding place. You might not like the results if they catch you.
Not exactly the same kind of gangster, but similar thinking patterns. They recently pulled a reporter out of Tokyo Bay. He had been killed quite nastily after doing a story on the Chinese gangsters in Kabukicho. My recommendation is don't play with fire unless you know you don't care about getting burned.
If you ask me, these Web sites that play these games are doing a public disservice and should be shut down. Heck, the Web sites might be created by the 419 scammers themselves, to help fool more suckers into thinking it is safe to play games with them. Quite possibly their newest wrinkle is kidnapping the game players for ransom money.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.