Stories of Arkan: Scambaiting

Have you ever heard of scams? Those e-mails which comes into your in-box telling you that you have received the rights to some huge money without ever having to work? Or those e-mails, which seem to be legit but after you take a closer look, it turns out to be fake?

Well, that's a scam. I was thinking about scams lately, when I found this site, 419eater. You may as well want to remember the Nigerian 419 scam that happened to spread through Facebook and e-mail. It happened to be where the site got its name. (For more on the Nigerian 419, click this link.)

Please note that I present no offense to Nigerians or to be racist in any kind. Scammers come from any country, whether it be the US, UK, Germany, French, or any other country. Yet, the domination comes from West Africa, about 50% - 55%. You can find this fact in 419eater.

Scammers are bad enough, because they try to lure you into believing that they are legit and therefore will continue into their business deal. Sadly, it is not. Well, take it from the logical side. How much are the odds of having a Nigerian to send $9M into your bank account without you having to do nothing?

Scambaiting is a technique to lay a false sense of security into those scammers by pretending to be lured to be one of their victims. This practice is used to get those scammers attention and to waste their time, money, and attention so that they don't scam anyone else in the process. So, when scamming is the bad thing, scambaiting is the good thing. It's like fishing for a fisher.

I have been reading some stories from those scambaiters lately. Some popular ones such as Shiver and Fake - they never present real names for security - posted their experiences in the 419eaters Letters Archive. For God, some of them are truly, and excitingly, amusing to read. I could spend hours and hours seeing those criminals get wasted.

Obviously, scambaiting is a very dangerous practice. Only those cunning enough and smart enough could rogue a scammer. Therefore I do not advise you into going to it yourself. If you don't want to go through all the mess - Shiver had to find an alternative international number for himself - don't do it.

You might be wondering what's with the wooden keyboard above. Well, get yourself into the letters archive and try to find that story for yourself :)