SpamBaiting

Mike Wendland (Detroit Free Press): November 4 article looks at SpamBaiting

There's a new way to fight those Nigerian scam e-mails that keep circulating online.

It's called SpamBaiting.

The idea is to pull a reverse sting on the spam scammers, leading them on by pretending to go along with the con through increasingly silly and insulting e-mail replies.

While it's not officially endorsed by law enforcement, the pastime has become so popular that more than 50 Web sites are now devoted to hassling the scammers. The biggest and most imaginative is 419eater.com, which calls the practice a cyber sport and has posted dozens of e-mail exchanges with scammers from all over the world.

Surely, if you've been online for any length of time, you've heard from these electronic con artists who pretend to have fortunes worth millions that they want to invest or move out of the country. They offer you a lucrative cut, supposedly to help them do it.

As the greedy victims get sucked into the scam, the con artists find ingenious ways to get them to send their bank account info or pay up-front fees needed to get the cash out of their country.

The con is called the Nigerian scam, or 419 fraud, after a section of the Nigerian criminal code that makes the practice illegal. Although it originated in Nigeria, it is being used by online criminals all over the world.