Turning the Tables on E-Mail Swindlers

[uriyohand]

I found this article at:


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/te...ts/17hoax.html


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On the face of it, everyone on the Internet should be rich by now.

After all, you've almost surely received e-mail from at least one intriguing stranger in a far-off land offering fabulous riches if only you will help recover some lost fortune. It might be $25 million spirited away during the fall of an obscure African regime. Or $400 million in oil lucre seized by one of Saddam Hussein's sons. All you, dear friend, need provide is a helping hand (ideally your bank account) and a few small fees, and perhaps a quarter of the money will be yours.

Of course, there is no fortune to be had. The only money changing hands will be yours, given to one of the thousands of so-called advance fee fraud artists haunting the Internet. Hailing largely from Nigeria and other West African countries, the "419" con artists - so known for a section of the Nigerian legal code - have bilked the naïve and the greedy out of hundreds of millions of dollars, according to law enforcement estimates. Some victims have traveled overseas to meet their supposed business partners, only to be robbed or kidnapped.

As a page at the Web site of the Nigerian Embassy in Washington warns, "Don't be fooled! Many have lost money!! If it sounds too good to be true, it is not true!!!"

Now, however, an ad hoc militia of self-styled counterscammers on several continents is taking the fight directly to the thieves. Aiming to outwit the swindlers, they invent elaborate and often outrageous identities (Venus de Milo, Lord Vader) under which they engage the con men, trying to humiliate them and, more important, waste the grifters' time and resources.

They then chronicle the exploits, documented by elaborate e-mail exchanges, at sites like Scamorama (www.scamorama.com). They also gather financial and technical information about the fraud artists, who are sometimes part of broader criminal networks, and refer their findings to law enforcement officials. Some of the antifraud efforts even appear to straddle the bounds of legality: disabling fake bank Web sites used to dupe the unwitting, or breaking into swindlers' e-mail accounts to warn victims already on the hook.

Part vigilante patrol, part neighborhood watch, part comedy troupe, the counterscammers are trying to beat the thieves of the Internet at their own game. And they certainly appear to enjoy doing it.

"There are all these people in America getting robbed blind, and what I'm doing is trying to stop it," one of them, a 48-year-old computer technician in Melbourne, Australia, who conducts some of his exploits under the pseudonym Stuart de Baker Hawke, said in a telephone interview. "I think of myself as an Internet-security type person." The Australian - speaking, like several others involved in fraud baiting, on the condition that his real name not be published - said that a personal specialty was figuring out passwords for Web-based e-mail accounts used by con artists.

But most of those involved seem content with spinning fabulous yarns that turn the tables on the perpetrators - in rare cases, even to the point of getting swindlers to send them money.

In one escapade recounted at Scamorama, a fraud baiter posing as one Pierpont Emanuel Weaver, a wealthy businessman, appeared to persuade a con man in Ghana in 2002 to send almost $100 worth of gold to Indiana - for "testing purposes as my chemist requires" - after being asked to put up $1.8 million for a share in a gold fortune. In other cases, swindlers are tricked into posing for pictures holding self-mocking signs, pictures then posted online. Or they are led to travel hundreds of miles to pick up a payment, only to come up empty-handed.

A 47-year-old manufacturing executive in Lincoln, Neb., said he had been engaged in such pranks for almost three years. "I've had many, many good laughs at their expense, and have spent nothing but time," he said. "They have spent countless hours creating fake documents, obtaining photos of themselves holding funny signs, running to the Western Union miles away from where they live to obtain money which I never actually sent, and printing out counterfeit checks to send me." As for his motivation, he said, "Hopefully, along the way, I've diverted enough of their time and resources to keep them from successfully scamming at least one hapless (albeit, most likely, greedy) victim."

And while not every success story can be substantiated, some law enforcement officials say the fraud baiters had proved to be crucial allies.

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Uri