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..."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...