Not an entry about music, but a quick education on some internet leeches, prompted by several recent news items that made me both sad and mad. Consider it a public service; we all need to look out for each other in cyberspace.

If you’ve been on the internet more than five minutes you’ve already started to receive piles of them. Emails insisting you won the lottery, your inheritance has been found, there’s a box full of money waiting for you. You can have it in just days if you pay this insignificant processing fee. Although these can originate from almost anywhere, the vast majority come to you from the West African countries of Benin, Nigeria and Burkina Faso. (There’s also a phone scam based in Jamaica that is on the rise, but this is about the email versions). Having met someone who had fallen for one of these scams via a dating website I started poking around to see what I could find out about this curious form of criminal and I’m passing on my findings to you folks so that you can 1) avoid them and 2) help educate your friends and family about them.

In my travels through the interweb I discovered a large and well-organized effort to combat and complicate the lives of the scammers. These vigilantes refer to themselves as “scambaiters” and not only work as a team to wage internet war on the “lads”, as they refer to them, but also educate the public. Over the years they have gathered an amazing amount of information on the subject and I was fortunate to find a scambaiter to have a Google chat with who was happy to fill me in. Here’s an abridged version of the conversation, which I’ll present in two parts (the second in another blog entry). Be safe out there.

WB (me): Aloha from paradise and thanks for taking the time to chat with me.

Fred (not his name of course): Happy to, the more people know the less these criminals can steal.

WB: So how prevalent is this sort of thing? I see scam emails nearly every time I look in my spam folder.

Fred: The best estimates have the number of scammers in West Africa at somewhere north of 800,000.

WB: That’s crazy!

Fred: Yeah, it is. I had no idea until I got involved with scambaiting that this was so huge. Although the numbers are a little fuzzy because a lot of victims are embarrassed to say they’ve been scammed, 419 is a multi-billion dollar business. It’s probable that it’s West Africa’s second largest industry behind only oil exports. If you look only at the reported losses, they amount to somewhere around $200,000,000 in the US alone.

WB: 419?

Fred: That’s the Nigerian Criminal Code that’s being broken and the whole industry has pretty much taken it on as a label. It’s actually “advance fee fraud”.

WB: The emails that I’ve seen all seem ridiculous, how can anyone fall for this?

Fred: Sadly, the scammers are looking for victims who are either gullible enough or desperate enough for money. A large percentage of them are the elderly. There are also some versions that are considerably more sophisticated. There was actually a law firm that got dinged for nearly half a million dollars by a well-organized group of lads.

WB: So how does this all work?

Fred: It’s pretty straightforward, an out-of-the-blue notification from someone who informs you that you’re rich. You’ve won the lottery, there’s an inheritance, and the list goes on and on. Unfortunately there’s some sort of fee involved and you need to pay it to get your millions. If you actually DO pay it, there’s always another, larger fee and it goes until you’re either broke or fed up. Then the scammer disappears.

WB: I suppose it’s not surprising that the internet spawned such a thing.
Fred: Actually it’s been around for the better part of 100 years. It started with a letter-writing version, often around helping a prisoner escape and being rewarded for your assistance…but there were a few things that needed to be paid for first. The internet just makes it easier and faster to run the game, plus you can send an email to thousands simultaneously, a lot better than mailing one letter at a time!

WB: So what do scambaiters do, get these guys arrested?

Fred: Sadly, it’s a rare day when a scammer is actually busted. They’re a huge revenue stream into their GDP and it appears law enforcement isn’t all that interested in affecting the bottom line. We attack them on several levels. First, we waste as much of their time as we can, if they’re busy with us they don’t have to time to steal from our grandparents. Second, we go after their bank accounts and those of the mules that they work with (more about that later). We have contacts who can connect with the banks and get the accounts shut down as they’re being used for fraud and, in many cases, money laundering. Third, we go after their fake web sites and get them shut down. There are all kinds, all bogus: banks, lottery companies, shipping companies, etc. The bank accounts and sites cost them time AND money. Most importantly, we do our best to educate as many people as we can.

Next month, part 2!