How To Beat Nigerian Scammers

While the premise of the article in the link at the bottom of this article is interesting - I've always thought the time you spend using up a scammer's time with you - who will never send them money is time they are not spending on other people who may fall for sending them money, somehow I wonder if this is just an escalation of the "war".

There are scam baiter sites already (I don't recommend their advanced techniques to the casual person), but also the idea of software sending false account information from phishing pages to muck up their databases is interesting. I admit to really enjoying the photos of how the scam baiters get the nigerian scammers to hold up these fuinny signs and take a photo of themselves, not knowing what the signs say because they don't understand english but they'll almost do anything thinking that money is forthcoming (when it's really not).

In the early days of spam, we used to use software scripts to send fake email addresses to spambots collecting up visible emails on websites, until they bandwidth got too intense just delivering those "false positives" back to the scammers databases. And after a while, the odds of randomly generated emails actually matching a real person became a real problem. I began crashing my own server sending the scammers so many fake email addresses.




And really, if you are going to "play" with the scammers and mess up their money-making activities, you want to do it in a way that they can not easily track you down, because they will unleash unpleasant things on you, like take down your website or do a denial-of-service attack on your server. So you would want to be as sleuthy and difficult to track down as they are.

But interesting to contemplate creative ways to muddle up a scammer's activites online.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443931404577548813973954518.html