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So the best thing we can do to prevent scammers is to respond to their scams, engage them for long periods and use up their attention and time? It will only re

So the best thing we can do to prevent scammers is to respond to their scams, engage them for long periods and use up their attention and time? It will only require a little time from each of us, but it will add up to a lot of time for the scammers.

city41 10y ago
There are groups that do this. Although their goal is usually to humiliate the scammer.
- zeven7 10y ago
  Link?
  - andrewpi 10y ago
    http://www.419eater.com/ http://www.419eater.com/
    - damian2000 10y ago
      Its hilarious that they got the scammers to hold up the hand written titles of each section of their website ... Letters page: http://www.419eater.com/html/letters.htm http://www.419eater.com/html/letters.htm Hall of shame: http://www.419eater.com/html/hall_of_shame.htm http://www.419eater.com/html/hall_of_shame.htm Trophy room: http://forum.419eater.com/forum/album.php http://forum.419eater.com/forum/album.php
  - andyjohnson0 10y ago
    Usually referred to as "scam baiting".
- projectramo 10y ago
  Groups? I did hear that TED talk but I didn't realize it was an ongoing effort.
- NTripleOne 10y ago
  I can only imagine that's where the "I AM SERIOUS NOW" image came from. Y'know, the one with the dude hanging a laptop from his penis, holding candles and straddling two plastic garden chairs.
tyre 10y ago
This is a perfect use case for the current state of "AI" messengers. Auto-reply to spam emails and drag out conversations. Free app idea for those wanting to start a small machine-learning project.
- projectramo 10y ago
  Can the AI get away with imperfect grammar and sentence construction to signal that it is a less educated human? You'll be fighting fire with fire. An interesting area of linguistics and natural language research: creating an AI that makes the same mistakes as a human.
  - schoen 10y ago
    This is discussed in Brian Christian's The Most Human Human (a book about participating in a Turing test contest); there was a chatbot that claimed to be a young person from another country and made a lot of mistakes. People found it pretty convincing and forgave some of its linguistic comprehension errors because they had a plausible explanation for why it wouldn't be good at English.
    - dTal 10y ago
      Sounds like "Eugene Goostman". It's common to "cheat" on the Turing test by pretending to be an incomprehensible human, like "PARRY" which "simulated" a paranoid schizophrenic, about which Daniel Dennett relates this anecdote in his essay "Can Machines Think?": "My favorite commentary on it was Joseph Weizenbaum’s; in a letter to the Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (Weizenbaum, 1974, p. 543), he said that, inspired by Colby, he has designed an even better program, which passed the same test. His also had the virtue of being a very inexpensive program, in these times of tight money. In fact you didn’t even need a computer for it. All you needed was an electric typewriter. His program modeled infant autism. And the transcripts--you type in your questions, and the thing just sits there and hums--cannot be distinguished by experts from transcripts of real conversations with infantile autistic patients." It's well worth a read! http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/mindsandmachines/Papers/dennettcanmach.pdf http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/mindsandmachines/...
Angostura 10y ago
I'd put some cash into a Mechanical Turk-esque initiative.
andyjohnson0 10y ago
> from each of us And therein, of course, lies the problem with this solution and the reason it will unfortunately not succeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action#Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action#Collective_a...
uptown 10y ago
What's interesting is that they seem willing to engage with email "cold calls". My spam filter caught one of these on my primary email addresses once. I took the sender's email address, and replied from one of my throw-away accounts and the person on the other end picked up the conversation as-if I'd been an original recipient of his message. So a comprehensive database of sending addresses, fed into a system that produces automated replies, seems like an effective way to disrupt the entire scheme.
danbower 10y ago
419 eater is a site dedicated to exactly that. The general idea is to act totally clueless about everything. They want a scan of your passport? Request instructions on how to use a scanner and do everything wrong. Some people take this a lot further and get scammers on "safari" - a long and expensive trip where the scammer believes they'll be meeting their victim but instead just waste their time and money.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
  There's a couple legendary ones on there where the guys have gotten the Nigerians to ship heavy boxes over to USA/UK/Canada and cost them hundreds of dollars in postal fees
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    I love when he manages to get a scammer to produce an artwork and mail it. One of my favourites: http://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm http://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm
    - tajen 10y ago
      In the same fashion as knodi123, I would laugh a real lot about John Boko if I didn't suspect that the scammer delegated the realization and the costs to a very poor relative.
      - anexprogrammer 10y ago
        You may be right. The hope, of course, is there's some form of natural justice achieved in wasting significant amounts of the scammer's time.
  - knodi123 10y ago
    There's one where they (possibly) managed to kill the scammer. Or at least convinced him to rent a car and drive to a war-torn muslim-majority country and carry a note into a bank that said, in arabic, "mohammed rapes underage dogs". There was a This American Life about it. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/363/enforcers?act=1#play http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/363/e...
fovc 10y ago
This was a common proposal to fight spam in the bad old days. Have clients autodownload the graphics, click on all the links, and reply. That would drive their hosting costs through the roof (100x more traffic) and shift the economics of spamming. It didn't work because doing that would confirm your email was real and would increase your spam in the short term. For scammers this might not be as big an issue
- 300bps 10y ago
  Another flaw might be if I wanted to attack nonspamminghost.com I would just need to send out spam in their name with links to their site and let antispam measurements do my dirty work for me.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Back when I ran an e-mail provider, we had this kind of thing regularly. Worst one, though, was when some spammer faked spam in the name of a guy that had previously tried to track him down, with a message advertising child porn with the anti-spam activists name and address. The guy needed police protection and his mailbox overflowed with threats. It was a pretty stark reminder that you can rarely trust the source of an e-mail, and any counter-measure against suspected spammers needs to be weighed very carefully, because it will be used as a tool to attack adversaries. Including anyone the spammers perceive as trying to attack them.
StavrosK 10y ago
Let's all remember Blue Frog, the tool that was so effective at stopping spam that spammers killed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog
- eklavya 10y ago
  I had no idea spamming was such a big business for people to go to such lengths. Thanks for sharing :)
GnarfGnarf 10y ago
I highly recommend this site: http://scamorama.com/ http://scamorama.com/ It provides hours of entertainment. The idea is to impersonate a famous person, and see how long you can string the "lads" along. I spent three months a few years ago replying as Jed Clampett, complete with an email address from "BankofBeverlyHills.com". I actually got the scammer to run an EXE I had written, to "transfer" my money into his account. It FTP'ed me the number of his account in a Honk Kong bank. One genius, who said he was a surrounded by "rabid smurfs", got the scammer to stand in an airport, greeting a planeload of passengers arriving from Helsinki with the pre-agreed upon sign saying "Otan Poskeen", which means "I'll blow you" in Finnish. When's the last time you laughed until you had tears in your eyes? http://www.scamorama.com/smurf.html http://www.scamorama.com/smurf.html
- walrus01 10y ago
  419 scammers tricked into re-enacting monty python dead parrot sketch: http://boingboing.net/2007/02/20/419-scammers-tricked.html http://boingboing.net/2007/02/20/419-scammers-tricked.html 419 scammers tricked into hand writing and scanning an entire harry potter book: https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/16/scambaiting-at-its-finest-tricking-nigerian-scammers-into-rewriting-an-entire-harry-potter-book-by-hand/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/16/scambaiting-at-its-finest-...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

city41 10y ago

There are groups that do this. Although their goal is usually to humiliate the scammer.

zeven7 10y ago
Link?
- andrewpi 10y ago
  http://www.419eater.com/ http://www.419eater.com/
  - damian2000 10y ago
    Its hilarious that they got the scammers to hold up the hand written titles of each section of their website ... Letters page: http://www.419eater.com/html/letters.htm http://www.419eater.com/html/letters.htm Hall of shame: http://www.419eater.com/html/hall_of_shame.htm http://www.419eater.com/html/hall_of_shame.htm Trophy room: http://forum.419eater.com/forum/album.php http://forum.419eater.com/forum/album.php
- andyjohnson0 10y ago
  Usually referred to as "scam baiting".
projectramo 10y ago
Groups? I did hear that TED talk but I didn't realize it was an ongoing effort.
NTripleOne 10y ago
I can only imagine that's where the "I AM SERIOUS NOW" image came from. Y'know, the one with the dude hanging a laptop from his penis, holding candles and straddling two plastic garden chairs.

tyre 10y ago

This is a perfect use case for the current state of "AI" messengers. Auto-reply to spam emails and drag out conversations. Free app idea for those wanting to start a small machine-learning project.

projectramo 10y ago
Can the AI get away with imperfect grammar and sentence construction to signal that it is a less educated human? You'll be fighting fire with fire. An interesting area of linguistics and natural language research: creating an AI that makes the same mistakes as a human.
- schoen 10y ago
  This is discussed in Brian Christian's The Most Human Human (a book about participating in a Turing test contest); there was a chatbot that claimed to be a young person from another country and made a lot of mistakes. People found it pretty convincing and forgave some of its linguistic comprehension errors because they had a plausible explanation for why it wouldn't be good at English.
  - dTal 10y ago
    Sounds like "Eugene Goostman". It's common to "cheat" on the Turing test by pretending to be an incomprehensible human, like "PARRY" which "simulated" a paranoid schizophrenic, about which Daniel Dennett relates this anecdote in his essay "Can Machines Think?": "My favorite commentary on it was Joseph Weizenbaum’s; in a letter to the Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (Weizenbaum, 1974, p. 543), he said that, inspired by Colby, he has designed an even better program, which passed the same test. His also had the virtue of being a very inexpensive program, in these times of tight money. In fact you didn’t even need a computer for it. All you needed was an electric typewriter. His program modeled infant autism. And the transcripts--you type in your questions, and the thing just sits there and hums--cannot be distinguished by experts from transcripts of real conversations with infantile autistic patients." It's well worth a read! http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/mindsandmachines/Papers/dennettcanmach.pdf http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/mindsandmachines/...

Angostura 10y ago

I'd put some cash into a Mechanical Turk-esque initiative.

andyjohnson0 10y ago

> from each of us And therein, of course, lies the problem with this solution and the reason it will unfortunately not succeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action#Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action#Collective_a...

uptown 10y ago

What's interesting is that they seem willing to engage with email "cold calls". My spam filter caught one of these on my primary email addresses once. I took the sender's email address, and replied from one of my throw-away accounts and the person on the other end picked up the conversation as-if I'd been an original recipient of his message. So a comprehensive database of sending addresses, fed into a system that produces automated replies, seems like an effective way to disrupt the entire scheme.

danbower 10y ago

419 eater is a site dedicated to exactly that. The general idea is to act totally clueless about everything. They want a scan of your passport? Request instructions on how to use a scanner and do everything wrong. Some people take this a lot further and get scammers on "safari" - a long and expensive trip where the scammer believes they'll be meeting their victim but instead just waste their time and money.

SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
There's a couple legendary ones on there where the guys have gotten the Nigerians to ship heavy boxes over to USA/UK/Canada and cost them hundreds of dollars in postal fees
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  I love when he manages to get a scammer to produce an artwork and mail it. One of my favourites: http://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm http://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm
  - tajen 10y ago
    In the same fashion as knodi123, I would laugh a real lot about John Boko if I didn't suspect that the scammer delegated the realization and the costs to a very poor relative.
    - anexprogrammer 10y ago
      You may be right. The hope, of course, is there's some form of natural justice achieved in wasting significant amounts of the scammer's time.
- knodi123 10y ago
  There's one where they (possibly) managed to kill the scammer. Or at least convinced him to rent a car and drive to a war-torn muslim-majority country and carry a note into a bank that said, in arabic, "mohammed rapes underage dogs". There was a This American Life about it. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/363/enforcers?act=1#play http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/363/e...

fovc 10y ago

This was a common proposal to fight spam in the bad old days. Have clients autodownload the graphics, click on all the links, and reply. That would drive their hosting costs through the roof (100x more traffic) and shift the economics of spamming. It didn't work because doing that would confirm your email was real and would increase your spam in the short term. For scammers this might not be as big an issue

300bps 10y ago
Another flaw might be if I wanted to attack nonspamminghost.com I would just need to send out spam in their name with links to their site and let antispam measurements do my dirty work for me.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Back when I ran an e-mail provider, we had this kind of thing regularly. Worst one, though, was when some spammer faked spam in the name of a guy that had previously tried to track him down, with a message advertising child porn with the anti-spam activists name and address. The guy needed police protection and his mailbox overflowed with threats. It was a pretty stark reminder that you can rarely trust the source of an e-mail, and any counter-measure against suspected spammers needs to be weighed very carefully, because it will be used as a tool to attack adversaries. Including anyone the spammers perceive as trying to attack them.

StavrosK 10y ago

Let's all remember Blue Frog, the tool that was so effective at stopping spam that spammers killed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog

eklavya 10y ago
I had no idea spamming was such a big business for people to go to such lengths. Thanks for sharing :)

GnarfGnarf 10y ago

I highly recommend this site: http://scamorama.com/ http://scamorama.com/ It provides hours of entertainment. The idea is to impersonate a famous person, and see how long you can string the "lads" along. I spent three months a few years ago replying as Jed Clampett, complete with an email address from "BankofBeverlyHills.com". I actually got the scammer to run an EXE I had written, to "transfer" my money into his account. It FTP'ed me the number of his account in a Honk Kong bank. One genius, who said he was a surrounded by "rabid smurfs", got the scammer to stand in an airport, greeting a planeload of passengers arriving from Helsinki with the pre-agreed upon sign saying "Otan Poskeen", which means "I'll blow you" in Finnish. When's the last time you laughed until you had tears in your eyes? http://www.scamorama.com/smurf.html http://www.scamorama.com/smurf.html

walrus01 10y ago
419 scammers tricked into re-enacting monty python dead parrot sketch: http://boingboing.net/2007/02/20/419-scammers-tricked.html http://boingboing.net/2007/02/20/419-scammers-tricked.html 419 scammers tricked into hand writing and scanning an entire harry potter book: https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/16/scambaiting-at-its-finest-tricking-nigerian-scammers-into-rewriting-an-entire-harry-potter-book-by-hand/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/16/scambaiting-at-its-finest-...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]