Counter-Scam Attacks: Scamming the Scammers!

While it often seems as though the government is doing little or nothing to fight the scammers, many individuals are. 

Some examples of spam and scam fighters are:

Scam baiters

Referred to as  "jokemen" by the scammers, they seek to waste the scammers time by leading them on with funny fake names and stories. But they also break into the e-mail accounts of the scammers and share the information with the police.

• www.419eater.com by Mike Berry, a U.K.-based computer engineer, who uses the non du web of "Shiver Metimbers". He also has a book "Greetings in Jesus Name!: The Scambaiter Letters" that is as funny as it is informative. One story tells of "Prince Joe Eboh, in which Berry convinced "Joe" to join "the Holy Church of The Order of The Red Breast, complete with appropriate photo evidence. Before he was finished Berry managed to get Prince Joe to send him $80 and Joe never saw a nickel of the $18,000 he was hoping his victim could be conned into sending.
• www.Scanorama.com by Eve Edelson, a computer systems engineer from California (also see her book, "Scamorama: Turning the Tables on Email Scammers. " - it is VERY entertaining!)
• www.yeawhatever.catholiccall.org

Scam Fighters

They use their technical talents to try to shut down the hackers through:

• denial of services (sending so many emails to the source of the spam or scams that their website or spam server is effectively shut down),
• tracking individuals scammers to their home countries,
• but these are all legitimate people like me," he said.
• attempting to compromise the scammer's systems

You want to be a scam fighter?

All involved warn that it is a dangerous game to play with the scammers. If anger scammer or a major spammer, they can use their criminal talents to ruin your credit or shut down your email.

And while it's tempting to write back to those scammers and spammers to tell them what you think of them, don't do it.  Merely writing back guarantees that you will receive much more spam, since you have just confirmed that your email address is an active account. And the spammers will then sell your email address at a higher price to other spammers and scammers.

the best thing you can do is report scams to the authorities and to ConsumerFraudReporting.org so the authorities can get evidence to go after them and we can help warn others of them!