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..."
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
After wasting his time I got into his hotmail account, changed the password and password question/answer, and notified everyone he was in contact with. He was actually scamming people-- it looked like he was rather close to getting some of them.
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Someone should write one of those screen saver programs that go in effect when your computer is idle. That would recieve instructions from a central site and constantly reload a spamers site until it was down then get insstructions for which site to attack next. If everyone installed this on all of their home computers just imagine the bandwidth you could drain.
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.
Should perhaps mention that wrt to flash mobs, Larry Niven AFAIK was conceptual inventor. Although his mobs were more ordinary communications, and relied on teleporation transportation, the concept really isn't that different from what's happening now.
I haven't seen any quotes from Mr. Niven about it (yet) but I do know that several people who know him are quite amused...
Cheers!
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
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.
It makes me wonder if they are DOSing more than just 419ers.
For example, would you trust a "decades old" UK bank with a non-existant street address, only mobile numbers, the registrant in Nigeria and no listing in the official directories?
From what I know AA419 is checking every flashmob victim very carefully before feeding it to the nerds. ;-)
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
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.
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....
You're worried about the slight possibility that they might be accidentally targeting a legitimate business, eh? I can't imagine how much sleep you lose over /. intentionally blitzing dozens of legitimate and cool sites every week.