Slashdot Mirror
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.
They look just like I'd imagined too!
In one of the letter threads, he requires the scammer to identify himself on a photo, With His Chosen Password!. Of course, this password is carefully chosen in order to positively identify the business transaction partner.
:-)
Hilarious.
There are a whole host people replying and stringing along the thieves and potential kidnappers - the Lads from Lagos have some great stories and images, Scamjunky (be kind, he's on geocities), and the obligatory Snopes link. There are also tons of links at Google Directory.
Just a friendly reminder to everyone that the criminals behind the Nigerian scam emails are just that -- criminals. There have been several murders involving those who have become involved with the scammers. Granted, these are people who went to meet with them foreign locales with pockets full of money. However, this is definitely a "better safe than sorry" scenario. If you really must contact these people for pestering purposes, guard your information carefully.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
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.
From: "Deeoni Chow" (address classified)
To: Slashdot
Dear Sir.
My name is Deeoni Chow, and I am the Lawyer of Son of Marcos Jacobs, the recently Assassinated President of Nigeria. Your contact information was referred to me by one of my trusted contacts, whose name I am not at liberty to compromize. I would like to approach you with reguards to a possible lawsuite. Please to remove my clients picture from your internet immediately or we shall sue for $16,000,000.00 (SIXTEEN MILLION) US DOLLARS.
Having a nice day, Hope this helping
Deeoni Chow
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.
I'm amused that people think they're getting any sort of revenge against these people. When you can milk them out of US$19M then you have revenge, otherwise it seems to me the scammers are still winning as the time anyone spends to string along these people is not worth it.
This is one of the few scams that I actually don't mind, as anyone foolish enough to think they're going to get millions of dollars in some sort of spontaneous money-laundering scheme, deserves to be penalized for their naivety and perverse sense of greed.
I think this guy is the original. This particular one dates back to early 2001.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
My favourite anti-scam-scam on that site is the one where they got the Nigerian guy to pose for a business card photo under the name "IAMA DILDO." It's laughalicious!
I highly recommend checking out this site. This is a guy that replies to spam and leads them on for as long as he can. It's completely hilarious, his sense of humour is wicked. Here is the page dedicated to Nigerian Scam spam
Random is the New Order.
These are rather unscrupulous people, and if they realize they have been played like this, they may very well try to get some sort of revenge that is less funny than these photographs.
Personally I would just stay clear of them completely. Making fun of hard core criminals is not always that funny in the end.
I know its a shameless plug, but I did pretty much the same thing to one of these guys a while back. I even got him to tell me what kind of boxer shorts he wears (flannel multicolored). I logged it all here/
It's a loaf of bread - the anti-scammer had him pose with a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine in order to "verify his identity" (i.e., waste his time and make him look like a fool).
Brilliant!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A swedish reporter (from Expressen) did this a few months ago.
After a while, he ended up meeting one of the people behind the scam.. in amsterdam. For anyone able to read swedish, the article can be found here.
The best part is definitely the 26th of April.
Back in stockholm
I call Lucas up:
Hi, it's Ingvar
-Where did you go? Are you trying to con me?
Lucas, I'm not who you think I am. I'm a reporter from a large newspaper, I'm just investigating your business.
*silence*
*click*
Without Nigerian scam artists The Spam Letters would just not be the same. Keeping the above in mind, please reconsider your revenge. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
They link to a site that lets you make your own nigerian spam! Heres how mine turned out:
t ml
site at: http://www.southwesternhell.com/perl/weblibs.pl
From sanusiabiola_311@mail.com Tue Oct 1 21:01:34 2002
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 21:34:23 -0500
From: sanusi abiola
To: [ Deleted ]
Subject: URGENT BUSINESS
Dear Sir,
I am Dr. Bob Dole, the personal Assistance to the late Nigerian
Minister of Justice and the Attorney General of the Federal Chief
George Bush, who was murdered on 23rd of December 2001 by unknown Gold Bars.
Before he became the minister of Justice and the Attorney General of the
Federation, he was once the Minister of United States Govenment. During his time
as a Minister of United States Govenment, the Federal Government of Nigeria
gave to his ministry the sum of US$376 , which is to be used
for the completion of the Ajaokuta Steel Industry and the purchasing
of Dimonds and able for the Nigerian Electric Power
Authority (NEPA). Then this jobs and the supply of the Dimonds
were done, but of low Quality standard and the Dimonds he
imported were of red quality standard and of stupid power capacity.
Because of the low quality standard of this jobs, the sum of US$19373456
was realized of which he deposited US$3.14159265357 to a security company
abroad and was looking for a reliable person or company whom he will
transact business with before he meet his un-timely death on the 23rd
of December, 2001. He informed the security company about his foreign
partner who will be coming to pick the Penguin although no company's name
was given to the security company before he died it was only I and the
late Chief George Bush knows about the Penguin.
Therefore, if you can be trusted in fairness to your honesty to safe
keep that Penguin pending when I will be coming to meet you in your
country. Please, if you are not interested with this business,kindly
inform me As soon as you received this proposals. At the same time, if
you are interested, kindly send me as a matter of urgency:your company's
name and address, your private Train and Helecopter.
This will be used to send to you the Plane which you
will use to claim the Penguin from the Security company.
I am awaiting to hear from you.
Best regard.
Dr. Bob Dole
NB: You can find more informations about the death of cheif George Bush
on the
following weblink:
http://nigeriaworld.com/feature/spotlight/ige.h
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
...doesn't mean their dumb.
From what I know (and can tell from the pictures), the people on the pictures are just puppets. Some really literally poor petty crime sobs draw into this to pose for some drug and weapon running band of Uberthugs that will kill you on the spot if they don't like your face. Don't think that anyone of the Nigirian Mafia or whoever is pulling these stunts, would be as dumb as to pose for such a photo. The people behing these scams have contacts to higher bank interns and whatnot, they shure as hell also have the infantry to take care of the 'paperwork'.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In the Soviet Union, Nigerians are spammed by you!
Oh, wait... D'oh!
Maybe reversed?
In the Soviet Union, Nigerians spam you!
huh?
My head hurts...
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
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.
The funniest Nigeria 419 scam of all time ?!
This was featured on slashdot a while back by another user on Slashdot Sunny Dubey
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.
Written at this Slackers Guild article.
Shameless plug, but I'm proud.
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.