Nigerian Scammers Scammed 177
sbinning writes "At least one Nigerian scammer has had the tables turned. A website admin retaliates against the fraudsters, with hilarious results." From The Age article: "When he found a willing victim, his anti-scam unfolded in much the same way as a typical 419 scam, promising payment only after a substantial investment had been laid down — in this case the receipt of a series of commissioned wooden carvings from a local artist. With some creative photo editing, Shiver Metimbers was able to string along his quarry with claims that the two carvings sent had mysteriously been damaged enroute, the first through a mysterious shrinking process, and the second by a rogue African hamster."
Impersonating an officer (Score:2, Interesting)
One illegal act deserves another ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now whilst the rest of it was entertaining, doesn't this really compare to fighting spam by spamming the author ?
Anyway - was entertaining reading, if somewhat on morally dubious grounds.
Re:Amazing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:unwise and unethical (Score:3, Interesting)
This would require that the criminal have a means of tracking the individual. In many cases, scam baiters use proxies when receiving deliveries, and only then if they actually accept any deliveries from the scammer.
And it's unwise because you may be breaking the law yourself.
To what law do you refer?
Finally, just because someone did something bad to you doesn't make it right for you to do the same to them.
The purpose of scam baiting is not to do something "bad" to the criminal. It is to waste the time and resources that would otherwise be used to victimize someone.
Re:The morality here is dubious (Score:2, Interesting)
Thats a pretty blanket statement, which dosn't take into account the level of weath greedy people have in the first place, nor any kind of assesment of whether greedy people often do the 'right' thing, which increases their wealth.
This is obviously one complex story in a gazillion, but its hard to condone anti-scamming, for these reasons:
a) the people who actually do get ripped off by scams dont benifit from anti-scamming, unless you believe anti-scamming cuts down on the amount of scams in the first place
b) that anti-scamming isn't basically being a better scammer
If you ask me, anti-scammers are into the scamming business for worse reasons than nigerian scammers are.
The Register (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's an Argument I had with a Nigerian Scammer (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:oh, bullcrap (Score:5, Interesting)