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Nigerian Scammers Scammed
sbinning writes "At least one Nigerian scammer has had the tables turned. A website admin retaliates against the fraudsters, with hilarious results." From The Age article: "When he found a willing victim, his anti-scam unfolded in much the same way as a typical 419 scam, promising payment only after a substantial investment had been laid down — in this case the receipt of a series of commissioned wooden carvings from a local artist. With some creative photo editing, Shiver Metimbers was able to string along his quarry with claims that the two carvings sent had mysteriously been damaged enroute, the first through a mysterious shrinking process, and the second by a rogue African hamster."
Wood carving scam:
http://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm
and another great one where he gets the scammer to tattoo himself:
http://www.419eater.com/html/okorie.htm
So cheating these folks should be like shooting fish in a barrel. (No surprise it's a slashdot staple.)
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
...but for all that, it looks to be worth a chuckle again. Here's the original full story (coral cached) that the age is reporting about.
So where does one get a "rogue African hamster"?
Nigerian Scammers try to scam nigerian-scam scammers by requiring a small investment prior sending artwork that precludes another large investment
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
Isn't this 'not news'? Scamming the 419ers has been around for a long time (nearly as long as Nigerian princes have been promising me huge sums of money).
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
For more examples of this, people at 419Eater and scamorama have been reverse scamming 419ers for years now. Oh and then there's my sig.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Why does the story link to a news article about the blog perpetrating this anti-419 caper? The 419eater blog itself is here:
http://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm
I don't think it is a wise decision to play jokes on these people. They are very serious about what they do. There have been at least 3 murders directly related to 419 scammers, see Wikipedia.
7 Million dollars from Queensland alone... Isn't that just mind-blowing?
There are some really really greedy and stupid people out there. It just serves as a reminder of how dumb people are and how isolated I must be from people like that for one reason or another. I really don't think I even KNOW someone dumb enough to fall for one of those scams.
Where are these people? How is it that they have any money at all? It's just staggering to think that they're allowed to vote.
It makes it fairly obvious why spamming works so well. I'd speculate that the people just dumb enough to make spamming a lucrative business are a lot smarter than the ones needed to make 419 scams successful.
It feels like standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, where you're just in awe at the magnitude of it all.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I'm truly amazed at the carvings. If they wanted they could be selling such items legitimately to the rest of the world. I wonder what an eBay auction on authentic Nigerian hand carvings would go for? :D
Wait a minute here... Is this actually a scam in the first place? 419 scams usually do not involve work on behalf of the scammer, nor a case where they send product *first* and expect to be paid.
Is there any chance that our website owner had just cheated the one honest artist in Nigeria? Perhaps the second email was in fact *not* sent by the first, but by a friend of the first who had been told of the opportunity by another who didn't see the target as a good one. (After all, the first reply did request that
If you know of an artist who could benefit from our financial help and who would be prepared to produce work for us to sell or promote then please do let me know.
It seems quite plausible that emailer number 1 took this statement at its word, and actually found one such artist. In any case, hasn't our 'anti-scammer' just managed to punish a clearly legitimately talented guy for trying to go straight? I wouldn't be surprised if our artist would really now turn to 419 scamming, given the impression of Westerners he now has, and the way in which his talent appears clearly un-appreciated.
This website has been my favorite for a long time. I've played 2 of the games the author has tried with some success (I got a fake Western Union receipt from one). The more baiters out there, the fewer of these scams will perpetrate across the Internet.
Someone needs to come up with a perl script smart enough to do automated baiting. It would sell really well as a sendmail/Exchange server filter. Think of the possibilities!!!
TO PURCHASE LICESNE FOR FILTER, I NEED ACCOUNT TO WIRE MONEY TO YOU FROM LAGOS NIGERIA. CAN YOU SEND ME PHONE NUMBER I CONTACT YOU? THANKS SO MUCH GOD BLESS.
YOUR FRIEND IN CRIST
NABLOM NUGUABYA
How many scammers could a scammer scam if a scammer could scam scammers?
Are scammers so numerous in Nigeria and other African countries that there are enough of them to get scambaited without relating their stories to each other?
Are some of the scambait stories fake?
That's too many uses of the word scambait for my liking, I am going for a lie down.
While I'm not opposed to scamming the 419 scammers, I find the tactics used in this case to be revolting.
Here's why.
Contrary to what one of the earlier posters said, there are not merely one, but MANY serious and honest artists in Nigeria, who are choosing to try and make a living in a field that is not typically financially rewarding. I worked in Nigeria, with Nigerian artists, and let me tell you from experience, many are hardworking and creative, and most importantly, THEY ARE NOT 419 SCAMMERS. They certainly do not deserve to be used as pawns in a scam.
Furthermore, many of them are quite aware of the 419 scams, and condemn them. They're quite aware that the 419 scams damage the reputation of Nigerians in general.
Visit www.nigeria-arts.net for a good example of what's out there in the world of Nigerian arts.
Bottom line: this Australian sysadmin and his "artwork anti-scam" scheme may have scammed an innocent third party artist rather than a 419 scammer.
Anyone notice that, toward the end of the scam, he writes an e-mail as a police officer? Impersonating an officer is, I believe, illegal in most western jurisdictions.
While this sort of behavior is probably satisfying, it's both unwise and unethical. It's unwise because these people are criminals that may come after you to hurt you. And it's unwise because you may be breaking the law yourself. Finally, just because someone did something bad to you doesn't make it right for you to do the same to them.
Could simply be the result of Nigeria's huge population (128 million), and improved communications availability due to oil wealth.
Letters come in hundreds of different formats. There are the well-known next-of-kin letters, the orphan scams, repentant dying sinner needs help giving fortune away to charity, tsunami victim donation appeals, fake cheque scams, wash-wash, anti-scam scams (been a victim of 419 crime? We'll get your money back for you - at a price!) and more.
More importantly: you know it's unwise and dangerous to respond to 419 mails. Are you sure your mother or cousin is aware of the danger? This is a good time to educate your family how these scammers work. Read The Ethics of Scambaiting as a brief introduction to the subject.
(I'm a 419eater member, so I'm posting as AC.)
This is probably my favorite anti-scam. The scammer, who is not poor or suffering (He has a team helping him scam people, it seems very organized), loses money, and the artist who made the sculptures got paid. And the anti-scammer is rewarded with nice sculptures.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
P-P-P-Powerbook
I'm not sure about everywhere else ... but isn't pretending to be or impersonating a police officer somewhat illegal.
Now whilst the rest of it was entertaining, doesn't this really compare to fighting spam by spamming the author ?
Anyway - was entertaining reading, if somewhat on morally dubious grounds.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
What a plonker. Only fools (and possibly horses) would fall for being scammed by Del Boy.
Was the art scholarship to attend the "Peckham School of Fine Arts"?
For the Americans amoungst us who have no idea what I'm talking about.
Once, while selling mobiles on eBay, I was propositioned by a Nigerian scammer to send him a phone in exchange for an online western union money order. (fake of course) I insisted that he set up the shipping through FedEx so that the guy would come to my house, pick up the item, and charge the shipping to him. He eagerly complied. So, I went to the FedEx website, looked up the maximum weight (50kg), and proceeded to go down to the beach with a box, shovel and bathroom scale. Once there, I filled said box with 120 lbs. of sand.
I went to the FedEx website later to see how much shipping had cost him...$1200. I could barely hold my laughter in the middle of class.
This website has been around for years.
MOD PARENT DOWN
Nigeria has a notable income level when compared with Africa? Maybe if you only look at the GDP of the entire country. Take a look at the GDP per capita:
Nigeria: 1400
Botswana: 10,500
Namibia: 7,000
Zimbabwe: 2,300
Mozambique: 1,300
Angola: 3,200
Congo: 1,300
Gabon: 6,800
Uganda: 1,800
Sudan: 2,100
Chad: 1,500
Ghana: 2,500
Cote d'Ivoire: 1,600
Algeria: 7,200
Libya: 11,400
Morocco: 4,200
Nigeria does have a GDP of 174.1 billion.. but it's hardly "notable":
Algeria: 233.2 billion
Morocco: 138.3 billion
Sudan: 85.65 billion
Ethiopia: 62.88 billion
I'm not going to go through the whole list..
BTW:
South Africa GDP: 533.2 billion
Spain GDP: 1.029 trillion
So South Africa alone is 1/2 of Spains output.. so that also disproves your claim that Spains output is 4x all of Africas..
Perhaps you should do your research instead of telling other people to do it.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
I dunno...I find the saga of Cole and the Anus Laptops (warning: NSFW) to be more entertaining.
This guy has been on the hook for over a year now, always scrounging up the money to pay shipping for what he thinks is a load of laptop computers (paid for with a stolen credit card, way back when), but is actually a box full of broken crap.
After the first few freight baits, the baiter resorts to sending broken appliances with Photoshopped pictures of the scammer pasted all over them...and Cole is still willing to pony up for the next shipment!
They're now on their tenth go, amazingly enough.
also.. the GDP of California is approximately the same as Spain or Italy.. so it is impossible for the GDP of all of Africa to be both 1/4th of Spain's and approximately the same as California.
Why don't you stop talking out of your ass.. and actually do a little research.. then you won't look like an idiot. Thx.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
So wait -- scamming a scammer out of shipping and taxes is what's novel in this case? No it's not. The P-P-P-Powerbook showed us back in ... May of 2004? Earlier? Good chance it's not the the earliest example either.
http://www.p-p-p-powerbook.com/
So to be clear -- why do I even need to say this? -- I think all the liars, cheats and scammers using the Internet should be stopped. I think it's dubious that vigilantism is necessary, and slightly ambivalent about whether it's appropriate. I'm pretty confident that it's ineffective though. Every time a nigerian gets a tatoo (or sculpts some wood!) at the behest of a bored Westerner that does nearly zero to stop this fraud from happening to others.
Since there is basically no point in scamming scammers but for one's own amusement, I don't think it's justified. You might not like flies, but are you pulling off their wings for fun? Amusing yourself and your Internet buddies at the expense of others doesn't seem terribly defensible.
To reiterate, scamming scammers is not worse than tricking grannies out of their retirement money. Scamming a scammer will not prevent scammers from tricking grannies out of their retirement money, no matter how hilarious it is.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Reminds me of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
Yeah, it made TheRegister last week. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/30/419_plonke r/
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
Looks like we're victims of the dreaded 403 scam... A weird twist on the old bait-and-switch
Right, I'll shut up.
^]:wq!^M
Not to steal anyone's thunder, but here's a link from an old post of mine (Nov. 2004): http://www.lunarlog.com/archives/000114.php A little follow-up: http://www.lunarlog.com/archives/000117.php And yes - the website is in serious need of a redesign/update.
Architectural Renderings
I always wondered how the Nigerian royal family ever managed to get any ruling done when they must spend their entire lives siring princes
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
These aren't even street-level thugs. If they were tough-guys, they'd find a way to get to a rich community in whatever country they could, then they'd just strong arm some loot. The very essence of this crime indicates they're not tough. The other reason it's not dangerous is the distance we're talking about. Is someone going to travel around the globe to punch you for making him look ridiculous on a web page? Rather unlikely. Especially not a poor guy from Nigeria.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
'Nuf said.
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
Please be gentle with this, it's a beginners hosting plan. :)
http://www.joebertvision.net/fun/wu-tang-clan.png
That Admin torched my icebreaker & tried to shyster me via PM.
Moral of the story, Wu-Tang Clan aint nuthin to fuck with !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
In the rest of Africa, people basically sit in the sun and wait for the bananas to grow, or they attack each other with spears and machetes to take each other's bananas.
What an ignorant moron you are.
It's not just Nigeria, I received scam mails from various countries including one from the Philippines. That last one I actually played with for a few weeks (writing as former German chancellor Helmut Kohl and his devoted secretary Verona Feldbusch) got a (really horrible) recipe for a Philippine dish involving pig's blood and a few laughs out of it.
Hi all, I would just like to address some of the questions and misconceptions about scam baiting that I have read on this forum.
In no particular order:
The ethics of scambaiting. It can seem to some that it is in fact the scammer that is the victim in this game. But if you spend nearly two years as I have wasting the time and resources of 419 scammers, you will very quickly learn that there is no depth to which they will not sink in order to get what they want. I have posed as dying, sick or unemployed characters that have responded to there mails.
When I say that I don't have the money to send, as I need my limited funds to pay for life saving medication, they will mail (usually aggressively) to say that the money must be sent and that I can pay for all the care I need, once this non-existent deal is complete. You will be urged to commit any crime or go to any lengths to get the money they want without the bat of an eye.
Scambaiting Innocent victims. The way we harvest their emails makes this virtually impossible. I have a special account that I use to catch them. The method basically consists of leaving your catcher email address in certain guestbooks and the 419 mail will come flooding in. I receive about 50-60 419 mails a day, and in over two years have not received one non scam mail to it. *Cough* ( Excluding penis enlargement and Viagra spam of course.)
I can assure you that any baiter worth their salt would be quite thorough in researching anyone they had suspicions about and would drop anyone they thought was innocent. We are only interested in scammers.
Baiter safety. There are various email providers that hide your IP address. All the information we give is made up. This includes any bank details we supply. A common misconception is that they somehow syphon of all the money from your bank account, once they have the account number. This is not true, it is simply asked for as they think that anyone willing to hand out this information is more likely to go along with the scam, It is a test of the malleability of the victim.
Victims that have handed out their real home address and phone numbers have been threatened, and scammers from west Africa do have associates in various countries around the world that can be sent around to your home for a less than friendly chat. The cases you have read about of people being killed are those of genuine victims that were lured over to Nigeria or South Africa. To the best of my knowledge no scambaiter has ever been harmed.
If I can sum up. It's all about free will, The scammers like their victims are free to walk away at any stage of the game. I have got a few to come clean and own up as to why that do this. The usual excuse is that they are poor and their Government is corrupt from top to bottom, so why shouldn't they be? Or they are on some kind of anti colonialist mission to get retribution for the years of western interference and exploitation that they have endured. I think they are just crooks on the lookout for easy money. I have no real sympathy for most their victims either. Although they will appeal to a victims good nature as well as their greed. They deserve anyone's sympathy.
In regard to the carving and other similar baits. These are fun to read, but by and large are not representative of what baiting is about. The day to day lot of a baiter is trying to confuse a scammer or waste as much of his time as possible so as to keep him away from catching out the unwary.
On the bright side the scammer probably had to pay a struggling local artist to do that fine piece of carving for him, so the result was positive all round.
Yes I do. I live in an area of Europe that has a very high population of settled Nigerians. They are honest hard working people that are totally disgusted and ashamed of the antics of their fellow countrymen and women. If you ever bother to reply to the scam mail you receive from time to time in your inbox you you will soon discover that you are wasting your sympathy. If they just came out and stated their case I think they would be surprised how many people would put their hand in their pocket and help. Scamming is no way to behave no matter how poor you are.
So its technically a criminal fraud. The 'victim' is unlikely to make a criminal complaint.
The concern I have is that this type of thing may be putting money into the 419 scammers pockets rather than hurting them.
There are successful 419 scams but at this point the sheer volume of attack spam means that the pool of potential marks is pretty thin.
The original gangs now run a scheme involving buying goods on EBay with fake cashiers checks, asking for part of the money paid to be forwarded to a 'shipper' after it clears. Its the same advance fee scheme but in a different presentation.
I think that the scammers sell 'franchises' for their original scam, setting people up with all the tools they need to do this stuff for an up front fee. Then they take further commissions from the would be scammers for moving money if they are successful, taking photographs of them holding a fish on their head, etc. Getting carved art samples is just another service to provide and make money off.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Depends on what figures you look at. GDP is a very hazy figure and is pretty much grabbed out of thin air. Look at *Revenue* for a more accurate comparison between countries.
Oh well, what the hell...
Don't look at GDP, it is not a hard number. Look at *Revenue*.
Spain's revenue in 2005 was about B$450. South Africa B$55. Egypt B$25. Nigeria B$20.
Sad, really.
Oh well, what the hell...
REVENUE!?!???
That just reinforces my belief that you don't know what the hell you are talking about. Have you ever, even once, seen statistics for a country's revenue?
The only thing I could imagine you are refering to is the government's revenue... but what does that have to do with how wealthy a nation is? All that would tell me is how much they collect in taxes.
Please save everything the trouble of reading your crap, and do a little research.. it's not that hard.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
If you ever bother to reply to the scam mail you receive from time to time in your inbox you you will soon discover that you are wasting your sympathy.
I don't have any generic sympathy for Nigerian scammers. But I also try not to have prejudices. I don't know what the situation of the individual at the other end is; it may be anything from a confused 12 year old to organized crime. And neither do you or anybody else.
The prudent, ethical, and legal thing is to either ignore those scams or refer them to the authorities; trying to play games with these people is unwise and may end up hurting people.
How many scammers can a canny scammer scammer scam if a canny scammer scammer can scam scammers?!
Hello Sir! What is this UNIX operations system you speak of!!! Is this able to be executed on my PC!!! I have Windows 2002.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
To be fair, though, look at how the sites operate.
Digg is based entirely off of user opinion; a story can make the front page in the space of an hour if circumstances allow.
Slashdot, on the other hand, has to rely on its moderators, and any story that gets submitted is likely to get caught up in the backlog for a few days.
For all we know, the stories were submitted at the same time to the two sites.
Goo goo g'joob.
But the Nigerian scammers long ago realized that people had heard about Nigerian scams, so they started claiming to be from Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, South Africa, Benin, and a variety of other African countries, and that doesn't even count the ones pretending to be from Netherlands or UK. Some of them are operating from Nigeria, so they're probably Nigerians; many are from cybercafes in Netherlands or free email servers in ZA, so they might or might not be actual Nigerians, but it's still the Nigerian 419 scam even of they're not. Also, Cote d'Ivoire was a French colony and Nigeria was a British colony, so the Nigerians are more likely to have the language skills to scam English-speakers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hey, I've got a low 6-digit UID, have been involved in UNIX on a daily basis since 1997 (and on-and-off since 1992) and I still come here occasionally.
PS. Don't want to start a flamewar, but if by "POSIX compliant" you mean GNU/Linux, you are mistaken.
PPS. I'm sure I remember seeing this scam, and those carvings, well over a year ago
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
As other people have commented, there's no way to tell whether the real woodcarver was paid a standard local wage for his work, or paid less or nothing with a promise that he'd be paid when the mugu paid the scammer. If *I* were a local artist in Nigeria, I'd probably want to take cash upfront rather than trusting somebody in the 419 business to pay me later. Certainly the real wage would be a lot less than the scammer hoped to receive - it was probably less than the FedEx bill. You can't ask the real artist, because there's no way to know that the person you're talking to who _claims_ to be the real artist isn't the scammer, but there's some hope.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And the saga continues... When I last attempted to access www.419eater.com I got the following response:
/.
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.34 Server at www.419eater.com Port 80
And also the forum.419eater.com server seems to be in a rather overloaded or non-responsive state.
This has all happened since the anti419 article was published on
I wonder what has happened to the servers?
Regards,
Aalfred