Trendsurfing: Scam-baiting (The Times)
By David Rowan
They are the online jungle's low-life - eBay auction scammers, Nigerian advance-fee fraudsters, fake bank website "phishers" trawling for the next sucker. Their lucrative cons play on human greed and naivety, yet they evade detection through the anonymity of the web. By the time their victims know they have been scammed, the bad guys have disappeared. E-mail trails leading to Accra or Algiers aren't much use once your bank account has been emptied.
But what if the fraudsters themselves could be conned? Wouldn't vengeance of a kind lie in publicly humiliating these scammers? As online fraud continues to rise, a new participatory sport is booming on the web. Called "scam baiting", it aims to string the criminals along until their own greed makes them slip up and they themselves give away rather too much. The rest of us, deliciously, get to follow the action in real time.
The results can be hilarious. On websites such as Scamorama and 419 Eater (named for Section 419 of Nigeria's penal code), you can track these reverse scams in intricate detail, from the baiters' first wide-eyed e-mails to their quarries' final humiliation. The goal is not to catch the bad guys, simply to leave [ITAL]them[END ITAL] out of pocket or otherwise embarrassed. So when a Liverpool hairdressing student was recently approached to help loot $12 million from Nigeria, she played her suitor along until he actually sent her $30 to show good faith. Another baiter, agreeing to help smuggle "gold bullion", belatedly insisted on seeing a sample - and was promptly sent five glittering grams.
Scam baiting has even created its own stars. Most famous at the moment is Jeff Harris, who listed his Apple Powerbook for auction on eBay. Harris, in Washington state, was delighted to receive an offer from London for $2,100, until the prospective purchaser asked that the payment be held by a non-eBay escrow service pending delivery. Clicking on to the escrow website convinced Harris that he was facing "your textbook eBay scam". So he pulled a trick of his own, sharing the results on a popular web forum called Something Awful.
He would send a "laptop" to London, but this one would be an old ringbinder with a "keyboard" made from stuck-on letters in combinations such as "LOL" (for "laugh out loud"). Through some deliberately naive emails to the "buyer", Harris elicited a delivery address belonging to the Jean Climax Pro hair-salon-cum-internet-cafe in Colindale, north London. And the clever part? In order to collect the fake laptop, the recipient would have to pay £350 in import duties.
As word of the impending sting spread across the net, Something Awful members went into overdrive - tracking the package's FedEx number in real time, marketing "Jean Climax" t-shirts, and staking out the salon to upload digital images. When the parcel was finally delivered, Something Awful members were present to document the moment when "a guy with an eastern European accent" paid the required fee. "He was opening one of the boxes, there were angry raised voices, and [an onlooker] said something like: 'Is it broken?'," according to one eyewitness. "I don't think he really understood the joke."
"We're just a maildrop," a member of Jean Climax Pro's staff (who would not be named) explained when The Times called. "We really need to look into this - we're not involved in any scams whatsoever." The shop's management may have been entirely unaware of how its address was being used. But thanks to Jeff Harris, its fame now extends far beyond Colindale.
(The Times, London, November 1 2004)
They are the online jungle's low-life - eBay auction scammers, Nigerian advance-fee fraudsters, fake bank website "phishers" trawling for the next sucker. Their lucrative cons play on human greed and naivety, yet they evade detection through the anonymity of the web. By the time their victims know they have been scammed, the bad guys have disappeared. E-mail trails leading to Accra or Algiers aren't much use once your bank account has been emptied.
But what if the fraudsters themselves could be conned? Wouldn't vengeance of a kind lie in publicly humiliating these scammers? As online fraud continues to rise, a new participatory sport is booming on the web. Called "scam baiting", it aims to string the criminals along until their own greed makes them slip up and they themselves give away rather too much. The rest of us, deliciously, get to follow the action in real time.
The results can be hilarious. On websites such as Scamorama and 419 Eater (named for Section 419 of Nigeria's penal code), you can track these reverse scams in intricate detail, from the baiters' first wide-eyed e-mails to their quarries' final humiliation. The goal is not to catch the bad guys, simply to leave [ITAL]them[END ITAL] out of pocket or otherwise embarrassed. So when a Liverpool hairdressing student was recently approached to help loot $12 million from Nigeria, she played her suitor along until he actually sent her $30 to show good faith. Another baiter, agreeing to help smuggle "gold bullion", belatedly insisted on seeing a sample - and was promptly sent five glittering grams.
Scam baiting has even created its own stars. Most famous at the moment is Jeff Harris, who listed his Apple Powerbook for auction on eBay. Harris, in Washington state, was delighted to receive an offer from London for $2,100, until the prospective purchaser asked that the payment be held by a non-eBay escrow service pending delivery. Clicking on to the escrow website convinced Harris that he was facing "your textbook eBay scam". So he pulled a trick of his own, sharing the results on a popular web forum called Something Awful.
He would send a "laptop" to London, but this one would be an old ringbinder with a "keyboard" made from stuck-on letters in combinations such as "LOL" (for "laugh out loud"). Through some deliberately naive emails to the "buyer", Harris elicited a delivery address belonging to the Jean Climax Pro hair-salon-cum-internet-cafe in Colindale, north London. And the clever part? In order to collect the fake laptop, the recipient would have to pay £350 in import duties.
As word of the impending sting spread across the net, Something Awful members went into overdrive - tracking the package's FedEx number in real time, marketing "Jean Climax" t-shirts, and staking out the salon to upload digital images. When the parcel was finally delivered, Something Awful members were present to document the moment when "a guy with an eastern European accent" paid the required fee. "He was opening one of the boxes, there were angry raised voices, and [an onlooker] said something like: 'Is it broken?'," according to one eyewitness. "I don't think he really understood the joke."
"We're just a maildrop," a member of Jean Climax Pro's staff (who would not be named) explained when The Times called. "We really need to look into this - we're not involved in any scams whatsoever." The shop's management may have been entirely unaware of how its address was being used. But thanks to Jeff Harris, its fame now extends far beyond Colindale.
(The Times, London, November 1 2004)
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