full-disclosure - [inbox] Re: Is this a phishing attempt?

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Date: Sun Aug 28 03:24:21 2005
From: evildagmar at gmail.com (Dagmar d'Surreal)
Subject: [inbox] Re: Is this a phishing attempt?

On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 00:55 -0400, Exibar wrote:
> It's not just people giving them bank routing info.  They have people
> sending them thousands of dollars in cash in hopes of getting millions for
> nothing.  The 419'ers wind up either kidnapping or killing the person they
> scammed and assume their identity abroad.  The 419'ers have even been known
> to go after family members as well.
> 
>   It's too risky to try and scam the scammers, perhaps we on this list could
> cover our tracks well enough to not be found by these criminals, but most
> people couldn't.

Scam the scammers?  I'm not suggesting people try anything like that.
For one, it would be attempting to defraud someone who's probably been
spending a lot more time thinking up ways to defraud people.  ...and
moral issues notwithstanding, there's probably not that much money to be
taken from people so desperate for money as to try to trick the old and
mentally infirm out of their cash.

I just want to be a _complete and utter waste of their time_.  My
thinking is that this is a 4 teh win scenario since for every one of
them, there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of us.  If those of
us who happen to be interested in wasting the time of 419'ers even
matches the number of people who fall for their stunts (which I'd like
to think is a really small fraction) we'll have doubled the amount of
work they have to do to get anything--reducing their profit margin by
half.  If lots and lots of us started acting like retarded citizens who
can't properly copy down a routing number, we could pretty much bring
them to a screeching halt.

The serendipitous thing is that it's absolutely trivial to get tools to
help you make up perfectly legitimate looking profiles to waste a
spammer's time with.  There's still tons of leftover parts from AOHell
and utilities for rolling up phony (but kosher as far as a modulus check
is concerned) credit card numbers that you can pull off the 'net in mere
moments.  What might take someone thirty seconds to generate will take a
419 spammer quite a bit more time (and with any luck, some fee money as
well) to figure out is complete bullshit.
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