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.

Comments

lack of vision: courtesy of GREED

[dandelion_wine]

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.

Hmm.

[Animats]

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

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What revenge?

[MysteriousPreacher]

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.

Re:Funny... but be careful!

[nodwick]

It actually seems like the victims are a pretty scary bunch too. The one murder quoted in the article was the shooting death of a Nigerian consul by a scammer victim:

Last February a retired Czech doctor who had lost more than 400,000 stormed into the Nigerian Embassy in Prague and shot dead the leading consul.

The point you're trying to make is a good one, though. I'd be a little more cautious about how much I mocked dangerous criminals in a public forum, especially when posting them to the internet using my personal domain. With the amount of information that's online these days, it's not that many more steps to reverse-engineer your identity from there.

Re:That photograph..

[Stephen Samuel]

This is precisely my idea in trying to get people to start responding to spams. If we had just a couple thousand people doing scams like this, I think that the nigerian scammers would just give up their jobs.

Even if you do the simplest of counter-scam responses, you make spammers' lives that much harder.

This one bets them all...

[Handpaper]

I came across this page several months ago. The scammer is claiming to have a supply of gold, so the 'victim' demands a sample - and gets one!

New Turing Test to Wipe Out Nigerian Scammers!

[eversunsoft]

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.