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.
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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.
"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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Basically this, 419ers are basically scammers. They try to get you to give them you bank information or credit information or just give them lots of money by making you think they're a bank or an investment firm.
The idea is you're stealing bandwidth to cost them a lot of money and wipe their site off the internet.
Are you attacking a good guy or a bad guy? That's a good question. You don't know, do you? You could be attacking a bad guy but you're taking down a small business internet provider that got duped themselves and you just ran up their bill thousands of dollars putting them out of business. You could be attacking a bad guy but their site is running off zombied machines in a hospital so you just shut down their network and killed a few people. Someone could have compromised that site and changed the pictures to ones on humanitarian websites and you're hurting the good guy. I don't know, you don't know. Who does?
And that is why a DDoS is generally regarded as a bad thing by everyone no matter who it's against.
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. :-)
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...
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.
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.
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
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 &
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.
Of course, there can be substansive collateral damage, vis that lady who embezzled her company to finance her advance fee fraud, and another gentleman who collected money from his circle of friends and acquaintances on the pretext that it was to finance a large shipment of clothing items for his business.
These second tier victims aren't necessarily weak and gullible - nor are they all on the internet. They were often approached by someone they knew and trusted. These cases, if none other, are a reason for us to be vigilant, and do what we can to put the frighteners on people that would purvey such scams.
( Although personally I think the time would be better spent educating people instead of trying to slashdot some website which the proprietors will just take down and put up somewhere else... )
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
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.
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.
So we are wasting their bandwidth, but I can decide to stop downloading their images at any time. So it is not a problem at all.
And what more important services does it affect?
And they spam all kinds of people, including smart ones who will never fall for their scams anyway. And spam is a major problem today. Yeah, except these American companies don't kill their victims, which has happened to 419 victims. So it's OK by you that they send spam? I don't like it, so I'll be happy to use some of my bandwidth to take their sites down. If they can't scam people because their sites keep being taken down, maybe they'll stop spamming me. And the money they make from scamming people will be used for what? Funding wars, for example? Drugs? Getting people tortured and killed?Sorry, I can't accept that.
Clever signature text goes here.
It makes me wonder if they are DOSing more than just 419ers.
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...
It is here: http://www.freewebs.com/kinomakoto/lv-0305.html