July 4th, 2007
Scamming the scammers: Web vigilantes work hard to bait email thieves
Internet users are outscamming the scammers in a competition for who can be the wickedest Internet vigilante, reports the New York Times.
Scam-baiters are taking glorious revenge on the mostly African scammers who take advantage of the unwary typically by offering millions of dollars in payoffs for helping them wire ill-gotten gains. The scam-baiters devise elaborate ruses to embarrass and humiliate the scammer. They have scammers take photographs of themselves in humiliating positions and post them on the Web. They have active discussion boards such as aa419.org (The 419 refers to the section of the Nigerian penal code that deals with fraud) where they boast about their latest subterfuge.
“My reason for scam-baiting is to waste the time and resources of the scammer,” said a scam-baiter with the Web name of Scam Patroller, who declined to provide any identification beyond an email address. “Each minute a scammer spends on my bait cannot be used to scam a real victim.”
Even if scam-baiters’ motives may be pure, law enforcement frowns on anyone who takes the law into their own hands.
“At first you might smile and think the trophy photographs are funny, but I have seen some with fraudsters in highly degrading positions,” said Ralf Zimmermann, a crime intelligence officer in the financial and high-technology crimes division of Interpol, based in Lyon, France. “They are fraudsters and they are not good people, but they have their human rights.”
On discussion boards, scam-baiters try to out-do one another, showing off the latest elaborate scam, including making the scam artists take expensive trips to pick up nonexistent payoffs.
“My most prized trophies are not physical ones — they are events,” said Mr. dinAlt (not his real name). “My lad traveled 300 kilometers four times to pick up money that didn’t exist, and he was physically thrown out of the MoneyGram office and told to never come back.”
The prize for catching a scammer isn’t necessarily their arrest, but rather photographs of photographs of them holding signs saying things like “I am a bad person” or standing with fish on their heads.
Although most of the scammer photographs are of Africans, 419eater says on their site that they don’t target one country over another.
For the most part these criminals are not, “poor people trying to scratch a living,” but are indeed very prosperous compared to their law-abiding countrymen, and many operate in highly organised, and highly successful criminal gangs. Millions of dollars are stolen on a DAILY basis, with absolutely no thought given to victims, who are losing vast amounts of money, homes, relatives, jobs and worse. Contrary to popular belief, it is not just “greedy & stupid people” that fall for these scams, says a statement on the Trophy Room page.
Given the size of the problem of Internet scamming, it’s hard to believe that scam-baiting is making a dent.
“Given the scale of the problem, it is like the scam-baiters are cleaning a stadium with a toothbrush,” said Suresh Ramasubramanian, who manages antispam operations at Outblaze, one of the world’s largest e-mail companies. “This may be an entertaining hobby, but it is not saving the world.”
