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One thing I have been wanting to do for a long time about Nigerian like scams, but never got around doing it, was the following: 1. create some bait email a
by S4M 12y ago
One thing I have been wanting to do for a long time about Nigerian like scams, but never got around doing it, was the following:
1. create some bait email accounts from gmail, yahoo, and so on, and expose them somewhere on internet so they get harvested by scammers.
2. write a dumb program that is able to do some primitive parsing of the emails from the scammers, and reply to them. For example, let's say the email from the scammer is:
Dear friend,
I am the widow of the former Prime Minister of Nigeria and I need your help to get out of Nigeria where my life is threatened, along with the $50M currently in my bank account. If you help me I am willing to give you 30% of that money, please reply me to see how we can proceed.
Regards,
Mrs Mary Noscam
The program would have just to reply something like:
Dear Mary,
I am very interested to help you, how can I help you to get out of Nigeria?
Regards,
Mr John Victim.
The point would be to make the scammer spend 10 minutes to read the reply and answer to it. After couple of emails, he will probably realize that he has been wasting his time with a bot, and just move on, but with lots of emails responding, he will have much less time to deal with actual victims, making his time worthless. I think writing a bot that is able to reply to the scammer is quite doable, since:
1. There are example of bots having actual conversation, such as SHRDLU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU) that was recently submitted here.
2. The answer doesn't have to be very elaborate.
Now I think I got blocked by the fact of having to make the bot be able to receive and send emails... maybe I will start that project some day...
- kinkora 12y agoI can't remember what the website is exactly and I am currently at work now so I won't be able to google it up but there was a person that use to do this except that he didn't use a bot but "bait" the scammers himself. It is utterly hilarious. What he does is he replies to a "scam email" and most of the scammers will do anything once they see an actual human being replying to their spam email. He obviously leads them on and his signature move is to always try to get the scammer to post a picture of themselves with a card held up (for verification purposes of course) and the cards usually say stupid things like "ilikebukake". He collates all the emails, replies, pictures, etc and puts it up on the internet. When I get home later, I will try and dig that site up.
- S4M 12y agoI think you're taking about http://www.419eater.com http://www.419eater.com Yeah, my idea would be to automate what they are doing. It won't be able to do the crazy stuff people came out with though, but it will be able to "reach" much more scammers.
- durrrrrrr 12y agoI remember this, is it this site? http://www.419eater.com http://www.419eater.com
- vitamen 12y agoOne example: http://oddorama.com/2008/02/11/scamming-the-scammers-5-brilliant-419-reverse-scams/ http://oddorama.com/2008/02/11/scamming-the-scammers-5-brill...
- thmorton 12y ago419 Eaters, possibly? There are quite a few people who contribute their stories there: http://www.419eater.com/html/letters.htm http://www.419eater.com/html/letters.htm
- golergka 12y agohttp://www.419eater.com/html/user_subs/godfather/plonker1.jpg http://www.419eater.com/html/user_subs/godfather/plonker1.jp... A great read indeed.
- deciplex 12y agoIf you automated it though, and scaled it enough, you could effectively spam the scammers, reducing their profitability.
- jobigoud 12y agoYes it could be a feature of the spam detector. However it could lead to an arms race. What if the scammers start to write bots that parse the answers until there is a substantial progress in the scam? We would end up with machine small talk and the overall level of spam traffic would skyrocket…
- eukaryotia 12y agoThe complexity/frequency ratio (As in, complexity of the bot over frequency of spam) seems a little low to spend time writing something like this. A manual solution would probably be better.
- S4M 12y agoNot really, the goal is to have lots of emails responding to the scammers, so they don't know who to pay attention to, so that's hard to have a manual process for that (and there's already 419eaters).
- marvy 12y agoSo basically, spam the spammers? :)
- jobigoud 12y agoAs I commented elsewhere in the topic, this runs the risk that the scammers themselves start to use bots to parse and analyze the responses, yielding to a net increase in spam traffic, although no human would read the messages.
- S4M 12y agoYes, but then the scam business would be less profitable for them since they would have to buy or build those bots to analyze answer. Plus it could create some kind of war on automated conversation bot which would be a net win for the AI in general.
- usemailgun 12y agoIf you're having problems with code to send and receive email then check out http://www.mailgun.com http://www.mailgun.com
- seizethecheese 12y agoSounds like a good use-case for mechanical turk.
- jakobsen 12y agoI think it's better if nobody benefits from there being scammers. Otherwise those under pay via mehanical turk may be tempted to pose as (or become) scammers themselves