Scamming the scammers.

June 29, 2006

I just read through this hilarious email exchange, in which a guy convinces an email spammer to carve a wooden replica of a Commodore 64 keyboard and ship it to him. Check out that link for the full emails and a ton of awesome pictures, including my favorite, and a hilarious twist ending. [Boing Boing]

After I finished reading it I navigated over to the site’s main page, which describes what they do (scam 419 scammers) and then I read The Ethics of Scambaiting, which describes why they do it. Wired Magazine writes about something similar.

In addition to being good for a cheap laugh, it’s a pretty thought-provoking topic—the perpetrators of these scams are impoverished people with few legitimate prospects, but they do completely unethical things at the expense of innocent (and usually not much wealthier) victims. On the whole, I side with the “scambaiters,” if only because they’re distracting 419 scammers from ripping off unwitting targets, but it’s certainly a weird and awkward issue (see the “we’re not racist!” disclaimer).

There are some really sad stories out there about people victimized by these scams. I believe what makes the stories so affecting is the fact that the scammers leverage their victims’ greed, their credulous eagerness to make a quick and easy buck. It’s not a big leap to thinking that it’s the victim’s fault—if he weren’t so gullible and didn’t let avarice control him, he never would have wired that money—but I think we really just recognize that, if we weren’t smart enough to see through the amateurish phraseology and the obviousness of the scam, we too would jump on the chance to turn $25,000 into $2 million (and lose it all, of course). And if we have to choose between acknowledging our own greed and looking down on someone who trusted the wrong person, we don’t tend to pick the former.

Posted in Life, Links