Scams and scam baiters
Everyone now knows of the great Nigerian scam , where you got emailed by someone who promised you riches if you transferred a processing fee into a bank account. The amount you had to transfer was $5000. This fraud is so well known now that it is called the Nigerian 419 scam. It began in the 1990s.
Millions got caught with this scam and other like scams. Research in the US has shown that since 2004 about 50 million people worldwide have been sucked in by these scams. At Fraud.org, of the top internet scams for 2007, Nigerian money offers rank 4, with the highest average loss of $4043. Friendship and love frauds now net an average of $3038. Scamming in Nigeria is now the fourth largest industry there behind oil, natural gas and cocoa.
On a personal level my son was scammed. He clicked on one of those “Lucky you. You are the 1 millionth viewer of this page. Click here”. It was a holiday for much reduced rates. He went for it, used my credit card and got caught because it was in the Bahamas, which is miles from where we live and of course airfares were not included. That’s precisely what they bargained on. That you wouldn’t be able to take up the holiday. It wasn’t something he could ever really use. So he had to pay me back and he could never use my credit card again. Now, my boy is a bright boy, so if got caught then anyone can.
What has developed in reponse to this is scambaiting. In 2004 TheScambaiter.com was born and has 20,000 members. There are many others like this now too. What they concentrate on is humiliating the scammers. They try to catch them out with their own game, but not illegally. Others email the scammers back so they lose money and time.
Here are some links if you’d like to join the anti-spam movement.
thescambaiter.com
ebolamonkeyman.com
scambuster419.co.uk
419eater.com
aus-scambaiters.com
Source: Green Guide, The Age, 17 July, 2008, p.28
August 1st, 2008 at 12:13 am
I posted this article on anti spam/anti scam a while back:
http://limealexander.blogspot.com/2008/06/revenge-on-telemarketers-and-email.html
It seems to have been well received; got quite a few diggs at digg.com
Excuse me for giving myself a plug but it is relevant to this topis
August 1st, 2008 at 4:12 pm
No worries. Yes I saw your article after I had written mine