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..."

Comments

Re:Joke's on who?

[nacturation]

It's a great idea. While the artists against 419 scammers have to serve up the HTML, they've hijacked the images, eg:

<img src="http://www.some-419-scam-site.ng/logo.jpg"&gt ;

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.

Re:I'm sorry I haven't a clue.

[LostCluster]

Artists Against 419
A "419 Scam" is the attempt to defraud people of their money by claiming that they need to send money and/or account details in order to recieve a large ammount of funds. If any victim actually cooperates, they're told that they need to send more. Spam is commonly used because of the relatively low cost of sending massive e-mails, and the fact that the scammers net thousands of dollars from each fool that bites. The name comes from the chapter of Nigerian number in law that says this is illegal there, yet a majority of these scams come from there.

flash mobs
This is a concept that comes from people who send text messages to a mailing list of bunch of friends that says something cool is going on, so anybody free should come join them. In cities, this can cause 100s of people to show up on the "if you contact 10 friends, and they contact 10 friends..." principle. Singer Avril Lavigne is currently doing a tour of unadvertised events at shopping malls, which have attracted up to 6000 people that more or less depends on the first people to see the sign announcing the event telling their friends, and having those friends tell others. This group is encuraging a simple Slashdotting against 419ers, which is basically the same principle. More people showing up than expected causes problems...

definitions....

[Carbon Unit 549]

Flash Mob
419

Re:Why this

[pyrrhonist]

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.

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!