On the face of it, everyone on the Internet should be rich by now.
After all, you've almost surely received e-mail from at least one intriguing stranger in a far-off land offering fabulous riches if only you will help recover some lost fortune. It might be $25-million spirited away during the fall of an obscure African regime. Or $400-million in oil lucre seized by one of Saddam Hussein's sons. All you, dear friend, need provide is a helping hand and a few small fees, and perhaps a quarter of the money will be yours.
Of course, there is no fortune to be had. The only money changing hands will be yours, given to one of the thousands of so-called advance-fee fraud artists haunting the Internet. Hailing largely from Nigeria and other West African countries, the ``419'' con artists -- so known for a section of the Nigerian legal code -- have bilked the naive and the greedy out of hundreds of millions of dollars, according to law enforcement estimates. Some victims have travelled overseas to meet their supposed business partners, only to be robbed or kidnapped.
As a page of the Nigerian Embassy in Washington website warns, ``Don't be fooled! Many have lost money!! If it sounds too good to be true, it is not true!!!''
Now, however, an ad hoc militia of self-styled counterscammers on several continents is taking the fight directly to the thieves. Aiming to outwit the swindlers, they invent elaborate and often outrageous identities (Venus de Milo, Lord Darth Vader) under which they engage the con men, trying to humiliate them and, more important, waste the grifters' time and resources.
They then chronicle the exploits, documented by elaborate e-mail exchanges, at sites such as Scamorama (www.scamorama.com). They also gather financial and technical information about the fraud artists, who are sometimes part of broader criminal networks, and refer their findings to law enforcement officials. Some of the antifraud efforts even appear to straddle the bounds of legality: disabling fake bank websites used to dupe the unwitting, or breaking into swindlers' e-mail accounts to warn victims already on the hook.
Part vigilante patrol, part neighbourhood watch, part comedy troupe, the counterscammers are trying to beat the thieves of the Internet at their own game. And they certainly appear to enjoy doing it.
``There are all these people in America getting robbed blind, and what I'm doing is trying to stop it,'' one of them, a 48-year-old computer technician in Melbourne, Australia, who conducts some of his exploits under the pseudonym Stuart de Baker Hawke, said in a telephone interview. ``I think of myself as an Internet-security type person.'' The Australian -- speaking, like several others involved in fraud baiting, on the condition that his real name not be published -- said that a personal speciality was figuring out passwords for web-based e-mail accounts used by con artists.
But most of those involved seem content with spinning fabulous yarns that turn the tables on the perpetrators -- in rare cases, even to the point of getting swindlers to send them money.
In one escapade recounted at Scamorama, a fraud baiter posing as one Pierpoint Emanuel Weaver, a wealthy businessman, appeared to persuade a con man in Ghana in 2002 to send almost $100 worth of gold to Indiana -- for ``testing purposes as my chemist requires'' -- after being asked to put up $1.8-million for a share in a gold fortune. In other cases, swindlers are tricked into posing for pictures holding self-mocking signs; the pics are then posted on-line. Or they are led to travel hundreds of miles to pick up a payment, one to come up empty-handed.
A 47-year-old manufacturing executive in Lincoln, Neb., said he has been engaged in such pranks for almost three years. ``I've had many, many good laughs at their expense, and have spent nothing but time,'' he said. ``They have spent countless hours creating fake documents, obtaining photos of themselves holding funny signs, running to the Western Union miles away from where they live to obtain money which I never actually sent, and printing out counterfeit cheques to send me.'' As for his motivation, he said, ``Hopefully, along the way, I've diverted enough of their time and resources to keep them from successfully scamming at least one hapless -- albeit, most likely, greedy -- victim.''
And while not every story can be substantiated, some law enforcement officials say the fraud baiters have proved to be crucial allies.
``I personally feel that we wouldn't have had the same effect with our initiative if we hadn't combined forces with the international scam-baiting community,'' Rian Visser, an inspector and electronic-fraud investigator for the South African Police Service, said in a telephone interview. ``I can't see any law enforcement agency not making use of them. They are on the front lines, and they have information that is very valuable.''
In March, Visser established www.419legal.org as a clearing-house for information about advance-fee fraud and as a launching pad for attacking fraud artists. (Visser said his government's approval process for creating an official site would have taken months.) Since March, Visser said, the fraud baiters have provided information that has led to seven arrests in South Africa and the seizure of property used by West African expatriates to conduct fraud. Last month, he said, they provided information that led to the closing of a fake South African embassy in Amsterdam that fraud artists had established to lend credence to their operations. One Saudi victim had lost $100,000 to that group, Visser said. He added that when the fraud baiters provide reliable information about fraud in unrelated countries, he relays the tips through Interpol.
Visser estimated that such schemes reap more than $100-million a year worldwide. Fraud baiters say that most victims lose around $4,000, but some far more.
Arrest and prosecution are difficult because of the international nature of the operations. But in January, the Dutch national police arrested 52 suspected con men in Amsterdam, most of them West African. Internet fraud baiters claim to have provided information that helped lead to those arrests.
Fraud baiters and law enforcement officials in several countries said that 419 con artists were often associated with broader, often violent criminal groups. For that reason, they encourage extreme caution when baiting: never use your real name, they say. Some officials discourage the practice altogether.
``We advise people absolutely not to respond; just ignore them,'' said a spokeswoman for the National Criminal Intelligence Service in Britain. ``The way to deal with these samcs is not to chase them.''
But chase some do. Looking ahead, some fraud baiters said they might succeed in substantially eradicating such schemes, at least on the Internet. One of those involved in fighting the con artists, a 48-year-old winery technician in central California, pointed to work on software tools called auto-baiters, meant to flood fraud artists with what appear to be real leads. ``Hopefully someone will take it over and do it on an industrial scale,'' he said. ``We want the scammers to spend so much time on fake responses that they can't figure out which ones are real.''
But others fear that in the battle to protect naive Internet users from themselves, human nature may not work in their favour.
``What was it that P. T. Barnum said about a sucker every minute?'' the Australian baiter said. ``People have been getting scammed forever. Greed endures.''
New York Times Service
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, June 19, 2004