An interesting thing happened to me a few years back. I got an email by someone pretending to be a decendant of the late Nigerian dictatorship who needed me in order to get to his money (which had been exploited from the people beforehand). The amount was several hundred million bucks and I should receive 30 million or something like that for my help.
Well, I am not a greedy person. And it seemed VERY far fetched. So I decided to inform Nigeria instead. I forwarded the email to them. I figured in this case the worst that might happen is that it is a joke and they would get a worthless email. So what?
I never heard from them or the pretender again. But today I found an article in a german computer magazine. The article is not online, unfortunately.
What I learned from it is basically this. The people who send these emails are not your typical spammers. They are crooks, frauds. If you agree to their initial proposal they will tell you that officials need to be bribed, travel costs need to be payed in advance and almost anything that will delay the payment of your 20-30 million bucks. According to national (German) statistics about 1.5 Million € are being gained by the crooks in this fashion each year!. Only in Germany. But it is a worldwide phenomenon. Internationally it is known as the 419scam. This is referring to article 419 in the Nigerian criminal code. The article about fraud.
So, the article I read today is a report about scam baiters. Meaning: people who try to scam the scammers. People who try to fool the ones that try to fool us. The baiters try to make fun of the criminals. They pretend to agree to their terms. And ask for a meeting. They will ask for a picture so they could recognize each other at the airport. Usually they ask for a very silly picture. Like: "Please balance a loaf of bread on your head." or "Hold up a sign saying 'Iama Dildo' " And they do that. And their pics can be found on the websites i give below. Here is an example, though.
The scam baiters claim to do a public service. Because if the scammers waste time with them they have less time to fool others. On top of that, people who receive scam emails might check the names of the scammers in google and get to one of the scam baiting websites.
Well, check it out.
Links to several scam baiting websites have been given in the article and I will include them here.
www.419eater.com
www.africanscam.co.uk
www.419fun.com
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