I’ve spent the last few days reading over stories of Vigilantes taking on Scammers and scamming them into wasting tons of time, and money. The “Scam Baiters” get the scammers to waste money hiring photographers to take pictures of them being ridiculous, paying for shipping of heavily weighted very expensive broken stuff, and anything to keep them too busy to attempt a scam on someone else.
Self-styled auction vigilantes try to combat online scammers by giving them a taste of their own medicine. Some submit false bids to auctioneers they believe are crooks, including sending fake Western Union receipts to trick the auction-holders into thinking they’ve landed a sale.
“We bait (scammers). We waste their time,” said Keith, the moderator of a site called TheScamBaiter.com. He declined to give his last name for fear of reprisals from scammers.
“This weekend, a friend and I ‘bought’ 30 or 40 Super Bowl tickets from Romanian scammers,” he said. “If we get four or five people baiting a single scammer, he has his hands full. He thinks he’s going to get all this money.”
Keith said he spends a couple of hours a day “baiting” auction scammers, fitting it in around his job as a Virginia building contractor.
“We’ve done
a
lot more
damage to the
scammers than
eBay has ever done.“We’ve done a lot more damage to the scammers than eBay has ever done. We have it down to a science, where we’re really confident whoever we’re going after (is a fraudulent seller),” he said.Keith said scam baiters also will launch “denial of service” attacks, in which hundreds of computers flood fraudulent sites with messages, effectively shutting them down.
The baiters have an unusual way to measure success.
“We also try to get death threats from (scammers),” Keith said. “Among scam baiters, a death threat is considered a trophy. That means you’re doing your job, you really pissed them off.”
[SFGate]
I’ve spent numerous times fighting a site that has had WAY too much activity and has been fighting servers errors and crashes as numerous others attempt to do denial of service attacks against one of the main forums for these vigilantes, TheScamBaiters. The pictures are quite often risque as the baiters do their best to embarrass and break down the scammer.
Below is an interview with one baiter, who was even caught on tape talking to one of the longest running baits I had ever read. This guy was able to get a scammer to pay for 9 shipments (and had him begging for a 10th) over a course of a bit more then a year.
Tags: Acting, Humor, Interesting, Internet, Irony, Knowledge, Oddities, Stories, Weird
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