Slashdot Mirror
Artists Against 419 Takes On Scammers
419scammers writes "Hello,
The following site is an anti scammers 419 site (plus associated scams) which has started to receive a great deal of publicity in a number of countries national publications. Their fifth international flash mob has now started. Have a look at the monthly flash mob link. Enjoy." An anonymous reader adds "More than 50 identified websites of the Nigeria-Connection are being targeted and the first ones has been already disabled. It was a very bad idea to copy the website of an innocent lawfirm..."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I had fun with one of these guys here.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
It was a very bad idea to copy the website of an innocent lawfirm..." *watchs the lawsuits and lawyer from the innocent lawfirm attack*
This signature was left intentionally blank.
What exactly is 419?
"Innocent Law Firm"
- Shouldn't it be "An innocent until proven guilty law firm?"
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, now would it?' -Albert Einstein-
How do we know we're actually participating in a DDoS against a 419 site and not a legitimate business?
This kind of mob mentality is a little unsettling. I guess it doesn't matter as far as slashdot is concerned though. They'd take down a bus full of nuns if they were a website.
This is going to be a major Slashdotting with a useful purpose!
for good 419 sport try Ebola Monkey Man (n.b. site is in no way racist despite the name)
Cure cancer.. and stuff! www.team45.info
The Funny thing about all these anti-419 ideas - especially the laws - is that it's probably easier to take out the stupid people here than it is to take out the stupid scammers in Nigeria.
The new Microsoft Email Initiative has promised to do just that- Every time people use their mail client, clippy will pop up with questions like:
Will you:
a) Give money away to people you don't know.
b) Double click nude.pics.exe.vbs.exe.jpg.exe
c) Mail this pyramid scheme to 30 other people
d) None of the above
Artists Against 419... flash mobs... what are you on about?
419 Eater has been around for a while and is pretty well known for messing with these scammers. Take a look at some of the pictures scammers have sent them and listen to the audio recordings. Some of these scammers really need to brush up on their pop-culture.
Just in case the server crashes and burns (like they usually do),I have put up a mirror.a inst-419.mugus.com/
The mirror of http://www.artists-against-419.mugus.com/ is at http://mirrorit.demonmoo.com/r_194/www.artists-ag
"Q: Why are there so many broken images on your site? A: That's not a bug! It's a feature! If you can see any picture it means that a website of a 419 criminal is still not down. But they have to pay a price for it! Actualy our aim is to present only broken images at our web site." So to answer your question, by slashdotting the site, we are helping take down the 419 sites.
> reload 419 sponsored web pages to wast their bandwidth...
Wast their bandwidth? Wast is past second-person singular for be. You want us to reload their pages to "be" their bandwidth? What in the world are you talking about?
If everyone who visits /. were to make that webpage their home page, I might get less SPAM. I dont know how any times I've visited this site only to find the articles /.'d, this should be one of those times.
~ there are 10 types of people in this world, those that can read binary and those that can't
Every time?
I dont do this everytime , just most of the time (espcially when I havent heard of the domain before and I think they might crash&burn)
As for no one wanting my webhosting, thats fine; I'm not here to push my webhosting; I actually simply have some spare space & bandwith which I figured I could put to use.
And from the looks of the stats generated server side, I would say my mirrors have been usefull.
Well as much as I hate 419 scammers I still can't bring myself to think of them as scum quite on the same level as mass spammers.
Think of them as the internet's version of the lion, culling the weak and gullible thereby keeping the species healthy.
Someone should show the webmaster(s) how to use spell check.
Heh... now I have another site besides /. to constantly hit the refresh button on!
Not only that, but it hurts spammers!
...
Having many people actively (as opposed to automatically) participate against scammers indicates a mass disapproval of them. Each node in a manual DDoS requires one human being deciding that participating is worth his time.
Although I am against scams and spam altogether. There are other websites dedicated to the same goal. For example: http://www.419eater.com/ This site is fun just to read about the scammers getting scammed.
Let's write a program to download page content continuously.
I'll be glad to do this.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Let's say I've been living in Mars, watching the NBA playoffs, that kind of thing. Now I have no idea what 419 is about, or anti-419, or who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and what the scam(s) are about. Following the link didn't help... why am I stealing bandwidth for going to the site? Is it good guys bandwidth? Bad guys bandwidth? And how am I doing that?
It's a great idea. While the artists against 419 scammers have to serve up the HTML, they've hijacked the images, eg:
t ;
<img src="http://www.some-419-scam-site.ng/logo.jpg"&g
So maybe a 1 KB of HTML vs. usually 10 to 20 KB of images, and that's for each image. You could easily add a 1 pixel frame which loads up dozens of images from the scam sites.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I don't understand exactly what are the 419 scammers? I was unimpressed with the site it looks very poorly done. Not what I would expect from geeks wanting to strike back at scammers.
They were for the pirate demonstration, thanks! The only complaint I have is that the formatting of the links is bloody awful. A suggestion: instead of listing "http://.... can be found at http://... ; http://... can be found at http://..." etc. it would be great just to reproduce the article submission as-is and replace the original links with your mirror links. That way nobody will have to decipher which links correspond to what original links.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Good idea. :-)
I'll give that a shot tommorow
SCAMI@HOME will constantly steal bandwidth from these unsuspecting scammers, now there's a good use for my CPU cycles.
~ there are 10 types of people in this world, those that can read binary and those that can't
It seems that they are taking a page from Publishers Clearing House and using a trivial amount of peronalization to get people to open the email. I wonder if the victims will actually check to see if such a relative exists, or allow greed to take over. It is like those ad that say 'the government owes you thousands of dollars.'
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Here is a game where you chase logos from the sites with your mouse, and if your cursor goes over them, they reload on the edges of the page.
Thing is, you can speed them up, and they automatically go towards your cursor. Even in the background (try it with a trillian window). And it's more addictive than you'd think.
Many 419 mugus suffer from their small and weak penises, don't have any major education and need lots of stock opportunities to put their money into. It's only gentle to help them by having their email addresses fed into as many spammers' databases as possible.
I guess the idea is that performing a DDoS regardless of the target is illegal, but hot-linking images is just bad netiquette.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Use wget from a few well connected machines to spider the 419'ers fake sites in an endless loop. Shouldn't take long to wipe 'em out. :-)
Create one huge webpage with lots of images linked to the spammers website (you know which ones, natural viagra, xanax, etc), and let's run THEM out of business as well!
I'll gladly visit that page while I'm waiting for Spamcop to process the reported spam
There are a number of scripts under the links for linux, mac os x, etc so that you could fully automate this.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Just do it the right way by sending enormous PINGs several times a second. Put them out right quick.
Fuck, if you want to do it the RIGHT way you find an exploit so you ping a million different people and they return pong to the target. That way they can't block you from continuously ramming your cock up their ass.
The Lad Vampire attack downloads 5 large images from the 50-something target sites continuously. It doesn't require refreshing or turning off cache, and uses all available bandwidth. Opera tells me I've got 10,000 images so far for about 240MB in just under 20 mins.
link to image, not site
Organizing communities to attack hostiles is a good idea, and lately I've seen a lot of mails pretending to be from Citibank, apparently linking to citibank.com, but instead hiding the URL by using HTML, and sending the user to a different page instead.
These new phishing scams have been covered by the media, and basically it opens a popup with the address field hidden, and it uses HTML/JS to recreate a fake one, giving the impression that one is actually at citibank.com.
An example of a received spam, which claims to link to web.da-us.citibank.com, but really links to a page which opens a popup. The address of the popup is:
http://www.strongerinfobase.us/scripts/sys.php
This page gathers credit card info. Maybe if there was a site to gather these addresses, hundreds or thousands of people could cooperate and submit so much nonsense - either random crap or seemingly real, but fake, CC info. That way, the scammers would have to wade through thousands of fake entries.
Maybe someone could even write a script to spam the scammers into oblivion :)
Clever signature text goes here.
Unfortunately, scammers and spammers often have a lot more available bandwidth than typical artists or honest business sites. Even worse, you toss up your anti-419 page that throws unwanted traffic at a page, and you increase the scammer sites rating. The various sustained DOS attacks on SCO gave SCO an Alexa Rating in the low thousands. A smart scammer might use the DOS attack to set cookies for merchant programs, and end up making money for the person you are trying to attack. We seem to forget that both good and bad publicity drive valuable traffic to sites.
B: So you're saying robbing from the clueless and senile is better than actually selling a product?
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
Previous topic on the same subject ...
0 4210
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/16/2
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
It doesn't matter who it's against, this is DDoS..especially now it's been slashdotted.
Hello, my name is Solomon Chang, and I am a legal representative of a certain Cowboy Neil, who has a similar sig to yours on Slashdot. Recently, my client, a strong supporter of Artists Against 419, passed away, and has left behind an account with a hell of a lot of Karma on Slashdot. However, Hemos and Commandante Taco have dictated that the account be furthermore untouched should such an unfortunate occurance transpire. However, if you should be willing, your sig matches my client so closely that we may be able to trick VA Systems into sending his Slashdot password so that we may both reap the benefits of 1337 hax0r status. However, my firm would require the access information of your Slashdot account (i.e. username and password), so if interested, please send your information and we will proceed from there. You will need to hurry, as the Commandante will attempt to acquire the Karma for himself if/when he discovers the account to be deactivated.
In sincerest regards and utmost urgency,
Skevin
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Mechanical/Formatting - The sites are decent, (i.e., not foreign spam bad) but they have enough errors and inconsistencies that I think they aren't up to the caliber of an international financial organization. If they really have any international dealings, they can afford a decent marketing firm or department to do their web site.
Sitebuilders - Look for systematic naming, formatting, and telltale HTML tags. Again, I wouldn't trust a financial org that uses a sitebuilder.
Plagiarized Wording - Try Googling some of the complex wording. A number of them show up word for word on other sites.
Take for example, financialsecurities.org.uk. The wording "has a highly experienced team of professionals providing unbiased and highly qualified services exclusively to its clients in selected technology & health care industries which drive the high-tech revolution" appears only at this site. Notice also the >>high tech revolution<< punctuation that appears afterwards.
Now it's possible that Viscardi is plagiarizing financialsecurities.org.uk, but Viscardi leaves a phone number, so you can call them and ask about it.
Now sure, this isn't hard evidence, but the consistency of clues on so many sites tells me these people (the artists) have gone through some work to come up with such a reasonably self-consistent list.
Flash Mob
419
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
The issue to this is that if you look at the headers that most browsers send to the site they request files from there's a referrer tag. A site owner can actually with minimal effort block requests unless they are referred from their own site... This seems like a lost cause to me.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
It is automated. RTFA. The pages automatically reload, or you can download scripts.
Their site features just about every grammatical mistake one can make.
English is not every person's first language.
They also accused me of stealing their bandwidth by going to their page. That seems to be a strange accusation coming from a group that is going out to crash other people's sites.
No they didn't. In fact they encourage people to, "...bookmark this site and revist us as often as possible", and, "link to us from your web site!".
Why is this guy's post modded "Informative"? I suppose wrong information is still informative, but jeez, people!
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
They do have an incredibly crap user interface and standards incompiant website though.
Pity their crap website design forces us to trawl through their ego to getto the juice.
Nice idea, pity you let your loud mounths and yahooing get in the way of users getting what they're after, instead of getting down to business.
I've always wished that I could take down a scammer with help from the Slashdot crowd when I've seen an obvious scam, such as the one in my previous post. Now, maybe Slashdot can post a story every now and then about this site to remind people about it, and the next daily "scammer slam"... :)
(By the way, there was an obvious typo in my last Subject. It was supposed to be "community attacks". Oh well.)
Clever signature text goes here.
I'm sorry, but DDoS'ing 419 sites seems really stupid. You might take their site down temporarily but you're also wasting just as much of your own bandwidth and affecting other more important services.
The 419'ers exploit stupid people. These efforts don't address either the stupidity of people or the illegal activities of the scammers. It seems more like a publicity stunt to call attention to the artists than a legitimate and effective effort to stop 419ers.
While I don't condone the activities of the 419'ers, they don't bother me that much. Turn on the television and it'll take you about ten minutes before you see a commercial from an American company that's basically doing the same thing, misleading people into giving them money for something that is questionable. I have trouble distinguishing the current spate of weight-loss and penis enlargement pills from the tactics of 419'ers.
I figure anyone stupid enough to fall for these schemes will do so eventually, so we might as well let them learn from their mistakes sooner rather than later. That also goes for the goofy fake-cashiers check scams being perpetrated on people posting online classified ads. If you're selling something for $3000 and someone sends you a check for $6000 and wants you to wire the difference to another country, you're a fool who needs to be parted from your money.
These are scammers we are dealing with here. They're really stupid. "Referrer tag" is probably not something that is in their vocabulary.
have any of you 419 baiters considered sending these scammers virus infected files, getting them to run them and taking them out on a semi perminate bases. if you wiped their hd it would probably save some people getting scammed
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This guy actually managed to get the scammer to send him money. He ended up donating it to charity, but none the less, that's pretty impressive. Worth a read if you've got nothing better to do.
http://www.419eater.com/html/stev_ebe.htm
While I would agree with you most of these sites are running on $8.95/month hosting and so don't have that kind of customization.
AF-Design, web development.
Why 419, where did this number come from?
:)
On a side note, are the '420' people more susceptible to '419' scams?
And more importantly, how you can conserve your bandwidth from unwanted inlining of images from the growing herd of bulletin boards and weblogs, via some Apache commands in your .htaccess file: Prevent bandwidth theft.
You can block inlining altogether, or allow it only for specified domains. You can also redirect users to an error image (I used the goatse.cx pic for awhile but found it a little over the top, and switched it to a small "no inlining" note - the phrase "bandwidth theft" has as many problems as does "stealing music").
My guess is that the stolen bandwidth message actually came from the scammers and not the artists against 419 website. Their linked image is, after all, not on their server.
As to the grammar: the Nigerians don't use "proper" english, why should we?
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
So if you had a 500 by 500 image built up of 10 by 10 images it would be 2500 images loaded on every page load.
Talk about artistic slashdotting.
Get your flash mob t-shirts here
MY SECRET DIARIES
In addition to the points raised by others, the easiest way to avoid the referrer issue is to have their HTML page load up in a 1 pixel frame. That way, it's their referrer header for the images and, because the frame is only 1 pixel wide/tall, the user can't see the content anyway.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
For modem users - Cube 419
For cable users - Scammers Nightmare
And here's an alternative - Lad Vampire
Come on, don't be shy, give them some good slashdotting - it's good fun for the whole family!
by having a bunch of individuals DDoS'ing the 419 sites they are not having to use their own bandwidth...
a bunch of slow connections can do much more damage than a few faster connections.
lol... one of the best spelling nazi posts I've seen in a while!
It makes me wonder if they are DOSing more than just 419ers.
Looking at the hit counter on their web page, showing ~330K hits, I'd be suprised it this is in the slightest bit effective...
The quantity of traffic you generate simply isn't that great when you can get a $9.95 hosting deal that allows 500MBytes per month or more.
Bandwidth is cheap. Loading the same image multiple times is a waste of space unless you don't cache in your browser (and elsewhere). If you have access to your web server config (even on shared servers sometimes) you can easily configure so others can't do this by requiring the referrer to be your own site.
RG
What business do these people have, interfering in the fraudulent criminal acts facilitated through these fake banks?
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
To annoy scammers - If you are the lucky recipient of a scam email, use the email address you're supposed to reply to to 'register' on a few porn sites - the mail scammers themselves will soon be flooded by spam email...
Yeah, and yet almost all the image links still work. Well, we probably shouldn't expect a whole lot of technical savvy from 419'ers should we?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
They are certainly a lot nicer than the usual crap that comes through and they only make up around 1% or so of spams.
If you view the 419'ers efforts as a freedom of speech then I still think that the artists against 419 scams are indulging in a bit of censorship. True its to help stop the stupid being departed from their money but as the saying goes...
The next time I see a multi-1000 dollar price tag on some work of physical art, I'm going to say that the material costs are just say 100 bucks and it looks like you spent all of 1 afternoon on it so I'll give you another 50 to cover ancillaries and say 100 for your time - USD 250 it is.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I personally visit all of the scam sites and fill their forms with false data. I figure if a good chunk of people did the same thing, the scam would become pointless as it would cost too much to weed out the valid data from the invalid data.
On their site they listed some other websites.
I found a fantastic online banking presence. It looked very professional!
What did strike me as odd though... was the annoying POP up ad that jumped out at me. I suppose they are just a bit of a progressive banking instititution and using that money to pass the savings on to the customer!
Really, if you are going to scam people at least give it some good effort.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Quite an interesting idea they have here. From Artists Against 419's FAQ:
Wouldn't it be more effective to start a Denial of Service attack (DoS) against this 419 sites?
We here at artists against 419 don't recommend any illegal practices! Such an attack might be more effective, but its less art.
Also from their FAQ:
Aren't you fighting abuse with abuse?
It's art! Sometimes art hurts, but there are no civil casualities in this battle.
You're right about the grammatical mistakes, though. Maybe artists aren't the best spellers.
Everybody with any sense hates spammers and scammers, and any measures we take against them seem like spitting into the ocean.
I have to think that even the most rational and law-abiding among us have at least fantasized briefly about launching attacks of various sorts against spammers and spam gangs. Innumerable fiendishly clever ideas for how to accomplish this have been launched right here on Slashdot--usually to be rebutted by wiser and/or more technically savvy heads.
The lovely thing about 419-baiting is that they're low-hanging fruit. They're accessible. Unlike the spoofers and joe-jobbers, they leave themselves right out in the open. It's as if they've hung a digital KICK ME sign on their virtual butts.
Revenge is sweet.
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
This seems to be a round-about and innefficient way to do a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. They should just automate the thing as opposed to having people sitting and clicking as they seem to plan on doing. I think the thing that seperates this from being a DDoS attack is that it's totally voluntary and people can do it at will. (CTRL R anyone?). That aside, anyone willing to sit there and reload the page is doing it at their own discretion, paranoid that they might miss something. Most (all?) DDoS attacks are from unwitting and unknowing computer users. I'm no expert at how this works, but to be on the safe side, I reloaded voluntariy a few times. Sorry if those images are hosted off of an unwitting host. If they can fake an email address, chances are that they are useing someone else's bandwidth to host their images. HOpefully not, but ya never really know.
Opening that page and downloading the images gives the scammers your IP. The longer you do it the more they will be pissed.
Wow, it's like they are running on some cheap 419'ers box. Some of the images are not working... does anybody have a mirror?
Two of the four main targets are inacessable.
g et -vr http://saapexbank.com
The other two are holding up.
wget -vr http://www.onlinepacifictrust.com/site/assets/
w
wget for windows
just post them on /.
A RTFA shows that the site in question encourages you to either disable your browser cache or use a javascript-based alternative. They also note that the scammers could work around it but the fact that a lot of them HAVEN'T says something....
If you can't see the images, then that 419'er is toast.
The images are on scammers` sites (they're hot linked), so if they're not working, it means something's going on, e.g. running out of bandwith (i.e. the system works).
A lot of the images on their site seem to load slowly or are broken, I better hit reload a few times just to make sure.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I stopped broadcasting it with one of those cool apps I found in a popup warning. w00t!
It is here: http://www.freewebs.com/kinomakoto/lv-0305.html
The Artists provided a nice bourne shell (hammer.sh) for hitting the targets. It downloads its list from their site and goes to town.
Its fun to watch the logs roll by. I think I'll leave it on overnight. Die 419'ers!
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
http://www.freewebs.com/kinomakoto/lv-0305.html
disable cache and leave multiple windows open overnight :-p should be funny
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
"Artists loves the internet"
Oh do they? Well they can stay the fuck out of it until they learn to spell.
Should have posted this on a monday morning to wield slashdots full might against the scammers.
superman runs linux
It's all worth mentioning there's to more flash mobbing than just loading the images; they also encourage people to contact the hosts of the sites, call the authorities, and basically attack the 419ers from every angle.
OK, so now we'll go slashdot the flash mob. /. is increasing the mob activity too.
On the flash mob site there has been posted a link back here to this story.
So we're slashing them while they're mobbing us.
At least
...and it's now 4:30 AM EST. The USA Slashdotters who haven't read since the Flash Mob began at Midnight GMT will be joining the mob in a few hours.
Please do not spam these EMail addresses. :-)
I hope that no spam bots pick up these EMail
addresses because they would get even more spam.
jjohann@afandtrust.com, afandtrust@yahoo.com, mansmithus@yahoo.com, info@africanoceanicbank.com, bthomas@africanoceanicbank.com, jhughes@africanoceanicbank.com, support@africanoceanicbank.com, info@afriswiss.com, tobi@afriswiss.com, atkins@afriswiss.com, charlseome@hotmail.com, stephen@yamagochigroup.net, info@aldisc.com, customercare@aldisc.com, haulage@aldisc.com, paymentclaim@aldisc.com, alphafunds@zwallet.com, thabani@zwallet.com, info@alfaconfianza.com, newaccount@alfaconfianza.com, grahamm@zwallet.com, afigroupsa@yahoo.com, pkopano3@apexfinanceandinvestmentgroup.net, pkopano6@apexfinanceandinvestmentgroup.net, pkopano2@apexfinanceandinvestmentgroup.net, benspecialist@yahoo.com, info@atlanticreditnominees.com, online@atlanticreditnominees.com, fisher_j68@yahoo.com, nwani_joe01@yahoo.com, edlewis54@yahoo.com, firstmerit2004@yahoo.com, senatecomm2@yahoo.com, raphkeno@yahoo.co.uk, mobutunzanga@hotmail.com, susanbrige@yahoo.co.uk, davidkameloo@yahoo.com, apexfandigroupsa@yahoo.com, joshualeon7@apexfandigroupsa.net, crystaltechy@yahoo.com, joshualeon11@apexfandigroupsa.net, joshualeon2@apexfandigroupsa.net, lotterycoordinator@mighty.co.za, offshore@atlanticreditnominees.com, customercare@cfintc.com, watkins@cfintc.com, lshoemaker@cfintc.com, maytrust9@hotmail.com, swiss_union_intl@chessonfamilyassociation.com, Swiss_union_intl@yahoo.co.uk, doncleno@netpiper.com, accounts@continentalfinancialtrust.com, administration@continentalfinancialtrust.com, cftnimda@hotmail.com, info@creditfas.com, sitefeed@creditfas.com, admin@creditfas.com, swissinfo@creditfas.com, customercare@creditfas.com, haulage@creditfas.com, info@creditfas.com, headoffice@creditfas.com, ceeschneider@creditfas.com, maytrust9@hotmail.com, autoterminal@hotmail.com, lottoawards@cresterlottosouthafrica.com, cresterw@yahoo.com, promotionsdept@cresterwinners.org, bbattorneys@yahoo.com, lotteryagent4@yahoo.com, eplace@ureach.com, accountdirector@equitytrustenterprises.com, nb_plc@yahoo.com, info@fame-merchantbank.com, customerservice@fame-merchantbank.com, admin@fawilliams.org, enquiries@fawilliams.org, consultation@fawilliams.org, account@fawilliams.org, fawilliams@fawilliams.org, ahmed@fawilliams.org, bisi@fawilliams.org, sola@fawilliams.org, sokoya@fawilliams.org, mohammed@fawilliams.org, john@fawilliams.org, ijeoma@fawilliams.org, osagie@fawilliams.org, info@ftfinancial.com, customercare@ftfinancial.com, haulage@ftfinancial.com, admin@ftfinancial.com, ftfinancial9@yahoo.com, foreign_service@gbcrossing.com, findire2@globallinkscashchange.com, findire12@globallinkscashchange.com, josephfletcher2004@yahoo.com, GL_uk2004@yahoo.com, grlsa@bigpond.com, lottery_cord@yahoo.com, jolucky@webmail.co.za, goldenlotto2003@yahoo.com, awards@goldenpromolotto.com, info@hillcresfinance.com, info@hillcrestfinance.com, admin@hillcresfinance.com, verification@hillcresfinance.com, accounts@hillcresfinance.com, securicor@hillcrestfinance.com, festacboys@yahoo.com, Netpage@hotmail.com, indecompany@hotmail.com, sitefeed@iftcompany.com, lhoffman@iftcompany.com, mdavis@iftcompany.com, jarmstrong@iftcompany.com, dgomez@iftcompany.com, njackson@iftcompany.com, nzondi@iftcompany.com, lbrown@iftcompnay.com, kfalcom@iftcompany.com, bdunlop@iftcompany.com, customercare@iftcompany.com, haulage@iftcompany.com, info@iftcompany.com, admin@iftcompany.com, info@kcdumex.com, form@lcbmadrid.com, onlinebanking@lcbmadrid.com, contact@lcbmadrid.com, lewiscruz@zwallet.com, lfinservices@yahoo.com, sperchard17@link-fin-trust-uk.com, account@faibb.com, th234th@yahoo.com, info@megabulklottery.com, megabulklottery@yahoo.com, info@onlinepacifictrust.com, banking@onlinepacifictrust.com, support@onlinepacifictrust.com, courier@onlinepacifictrust.co
Come to Britain, where our simple washdown WC basins {with 110mm dia. full-bore outlet} will handle almost anything, and our flushing cisterns will not drain continuously even if the chain is held down. You know the whole problem with the unnecessarily complicated US-style syphonic WC is that constriction in the waste pipe ..... without it, you wouldn't be able to form that all-important partial vacuum to draw the contents out of the basin. In fact, that's exactly how a washdown suite works anyway ..... the basin contents are pushed out by the flushwater. Sure, it's noisier, but at least the sound effects are a good clue that the room is occupied.
Great idea,but you should all add those scamsites
to your list of non-proxied and/or cached sites,
e.g. in your browser. Otherwise all your reloading
will just serve the images from your cache, instead
of from the actual fake bank sites.
You could also use shift-reload, but then you would
also load the artists-against-419 site as well.
I see an inconsistency between "$9.95 hosting deals" and "making millions of dollars". If I were a scammer, with my first $2k I'd get some brownies and make a decent webhosting/website.
Here's an idea to filter spam/protect against scams. Note that it requires some getting-used-to.
When someone wants to send you a message by e-mail, the following happens:
1. Person sends you the e-mail (e-mail 1).
2. Your mail receiving daemon generates a digest of this mail, and sends back a mail message (e-mail 2) containing the digest. (Instead of a digest, also some unique code can be used).
3. Now the person has to reply to the mail, or he/she is redirected to a website where he/she should fill in the digest (as an acknowledgement).
4. Your mail reading program only shows mail messages that are acknowledged by the sender.
To check that the sender is really a human being, the daemon could also send some graphically morphed image of the digest code, which the sender should then retype.
For mail from non-human senders (mailing-lists, etc.), you could still use a white-list.
Questions:
A) Would there be any objection against such a system?
B) Does an implementation of such a system already exist? Where to find? If it does not already exist, then it would be a great OSS project, IMO.
Extension:
If the person is asked in step 3 to visit a url to enter the digest, your web-server could generate anti-419 html code at this url (i.e., containing links to images on scamming sites, thus wasting their bandwidth). The urls of spammers/scammers could be collected once a day by your web-server from a central location. The overall scheme would then be a two-way mechanism to rule out spamming/scamming.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Manually reloading them is dumb. /dev/null is continuous, legal, automated, and effective.
Wget'ing them to
The forum peeps on Something Awful have blasted pedo sites into oblivion this way.
(Yeah, and the fact that they have the account numbers in the source of their web page should tell you something too, never minding the lack of SSL).
Hmm... for the real lazy, it appears that any odd number between 2206076832141101 and 2206076832141165 (among others) will work
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I dunno, I think that last week's _Over the Hedge_ strips may be doing more to combat the 419 scammers by reducing the victim supply. Let's hope that at least a few people caught a clue from it.
> "be" their bandwidth?
I'm getting a Caddyshack flashback! "Be the ball!" "Just be the ball, be the ball, be the ball. You're not being the ball Danny." "Be the bandwidth!"
Archiving the target sites continuously by wget'ing them to /dev/null works too.
Stupid.
while true; do curl -s http://your.site.com/; done