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."

Comments

Why not link directly to the actual content?

[GeekLife.com]

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

Re:Dont screw with these people

[rolfwind]

Living in fear is not the way to live. Besides, one murder was the victim taking it out on a random (?) Nigerian - so the danger isn't one sided. The second murder was a man who went to Nigeria pursuing his money. I think, like terrorism, while these crimes are tragic, that the statitists are low actually experiencing them. But incidents like this make me think of Twain's essay "The Damned Human Race."

OTOH, many Nigerian scammers think westerners are stupid and assume we are all easy money - they deserve to be taught otherwise with these pranks. I won't live in fear of thieves.

From the wiki you linked to.

One American was murdered in Nigeria in June 1995 while pursuing his lost money.[8]

In February 2003, a scam victim from the Czech Republic shot and killed Michael Lekara Wayid, an official at the Nigerian embassy in Prague.[9] [10]

A Greek man was murdered in South Africa after responding to a 419 scam.[11]

Re:The morality here is dubious

[suckmysav]

Actually, the artist and the scammer were not the same person. If you properly RTA (oops, this is slashdot, sorry) you will find that the scammer paid the artist to produce the carving in the hope that "Derek Trotter" would ultimately pay up big time in the form of a large "art scholarship".

As for the GP suggesting that this might be a case o ripping off "the one honest artist in Nigeria", again, if you properly RTA you would learn that this all came about after the fake "Derek Trotter, Director; Trotters Fine Arts" replied to a standard 419 scam letter with something like "Sorry I'm too busy giving out $100K art scholarships right now to help but do get any artist friends you might have to contact me".

Two days later the same scammer replied back under a different name claiming to have read about the non-existant "Trotters Fine Arts" on the internet and was interested in applying for a scholarship. From there it was game on, the scammer paid an artist to produce the works thinking some naive western art dealer would in turn pay huge money to foster the scammers non-existant artistic talent. He also ended up paying the freight costs to ship the pieces as well.

It appears this 419 scammer has just learnt a lesson that he should already well know, that unchecked greed will make people do the stupidist things.

Re:Scamming Nigerian Artists is wrong

[FroBugg]

If you read the entirety of the original website, he claims at the bottom to have gotten in touch with the scammer through another alias, gotten the name and contact info of the artist, and confirmed that the artist was paid for the pieces (though he wasn't able to find out how much).

Re:oh, bullcrap

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a scambaiter at 419eater and can tell you that your assumptions are quite incorrect - they have connections abroad. I know cases in which Nigerian scammers showed up in Houston, London, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Bangkok and Madrid (we get them on webcams by agreeing to "meet them" on a specific location). The ones that e-mail you are the lowest level idiots in Internet cafes but once they think they have a victim on the hook they pass you on higher up in the gang and you notice a significant improvement in their English.