So as you may have heard, a little article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald as well as The Age..
It’s the same article as far as I can tell. And yes, I am the Taryn responsible, though of course Taryn is not my real name and may I just point out, if you’re using your real name on the internet, that’s not a good idea. People can track you down. Seriously. Don’t do it. It’s dumb-itty dumb and very dangerous.
Someone linked to the article on a discussion forum I hang out at and for some reason a mod there thinks it’s not ok to scambait so therefore has denied discussion which encourages scambaiting or tells people how to do it. Which is akin to handing people a loaded gun and refusing to give them instructions on how *not* to shoot themselves, in my opinion. If you want to scambait, you need to be doing it safely, and if you want to do it but nobody is allowing you to find out how to do it safely, that’s putting people’s personal safety at risk. And so the reason for this post. Sorry if the mod concerned doesn’t like it, but this is my blog and you have no power here. ;)
Scammers are criminals. They have been known to kidnap, torture, and murder victims. If you give them any personal information that they could trace you with, you could be in danger. So you need to make everything up. Fake names, fake addresses, and in fact make them somewhere far from where you really live. When I first started out baiting, I was pretending to be in the USA.
Secondly, the internet uses things called IP addresses (our little anonymous friend from yesterday will enjoy this bit) and those can actually identify your computer. For example – click here – every time you send an email your IP address goes with it, and someone who knows what they are doing can look at the headers of the email, and see your IP address.
But wait, there’s more, because every time you visit a website, your computer tells that website all kinds of information – such as your browser type, what kind of operating system you use, even right down to your screen resolution. People like me use trackers which take a copy of all of that information each time you visit here. That’s no problem if you’re a nice person who just wants to read my blog, but if you want to leave a nasty comment, you’re screwed, because all that info is right there just waiting for me to send it to your ISP. ;) which of course, I already have. So look forward to what Karma is bringing you, my little anonymous mate. ;) So you don’t visit scammer websites without knowing how to *hide* all that information.
Scambaiters need to know a few technical things in order to be able to do what we do. We’re pretty smart, it’s really not a good idea to mess with us.
