scambaiting

A Journey Along The Road To Stopping Online Scammers

7 Comments Posted on by Snoskred
Aside from the blog and the commenting and the housework and preparing to start my business, a few days ago I got on a bus to a different kind of journey. I have been on this journey before and I’d like to tell you a little about it. I’ve become a spammer – but for a good cause. ;)

Search Engines Save Scam Victims

Joe Wein runs a website on the internet which is dedicated to stopping 419 scammers – as well as spammers who send you emails you don’t want. Joe maintains an online list of scammer email accounts and scammer emails, all of which are spidered by the search engines. This means if a potential scam victim types in a scammers email address, one of the very first hits they will get will be Joe’s website. Joe also runs the Scam-O-Matic tool which can look at an email and tell you whether it is a scam or not. He is frankly a technical genius and I’m not saying that just because he’s my friend. ;)

Blogs Can Save Them Too –

Sephy also runs four blogs which post scammer emails – the links to them are under sites I love in my sidebar – and there’s a few other sites around which do this. All of them are unique and necessary websites because no one person gets all the scam emails these scammers send out. It is estimated that there are over 100,000 419 scammers in Nigeria alone – that does not count those who have moved to countries like the USA, Canada and the UK. Dubai and India are the newest hotspots for scammers.

Shut Down The Email Accounts!

A lot of people ask me – why don’t “they” shut down the scammers email accounts? Many of the email services do – which creates an issue with the scammer email list. Currently on the list there are over 172,000 scammer email addresses, and there’s also over 140,000 old email addresses which had been recently cut from the list because it had become far too large. From time to time, Sephy and I and a few of the other scambaiters take a bit of our time to email all the lads on the list – all the “bounces” where the mail server says “this account has been closed” and other error messages are fed back to Joe, and the list can be cleared of closed email addresses.

How many do I send each day?

For the past 2 days I have been sending out 990 emails a day from 20 email accounts = 19,800 emails a day!. It generally takes me about an hour to do this. Once I get into “the zone” and have some music playing it’s just a matter of copy and paste. I send two emails per account, 495 scammer email addresses in each one of those emails, all as blind carbon copy – BCC. At this early stage roughly 50% of the email accounts bounce, I’ll have some better figures on that when we’re done.

What Is In The Email I Send?

The email I send tells the scammers that I have a significant amount of money ready to send to them and I need the bank account details to transfer the funds – all the bank account details sent to me by the scammers are passed on to the proper authorities, they get investigated and the majority of them are shut down by law enforcement. This can mean some victims get their money back when the accounts are investigated. So in general, this is a great way to be spending some of my time. ;) The last time we did this, literally thousands of bank accounts were reported.

What Replies Do I Get?

For the scammers whose email accounts are not closed and do not bounce –

  • some of them reply with abuse because they’ve been on the list a while and they’ve seen a few of these emails from us
  • some of them think this is an “accidentally sent email” and they jump at the chance to steal easy money
  • at least 10% of them respond with bank account details
  • another 40-60% respond asking me to send money by Western Union – these email addresses are saved and re-emailed with a request for bank account information which yields another decent amount of bank accounts
  • some of them take this opportunity to send us their scam emails, which all get added to a few of the websites which keep these emails available to the search spiders
  • some of them reply with some quite odd things indeed
  • some of the classic responses get put aside to be sent a telephone number where they can call me and I can waste a bit of their time and money chatting to them – generally not understanding what they are trying to say to me

Once we have cleaned the list thoroughly, we’ll be hooking a lot of these lads up with the baiting tool, so they can spend their time corresponding with fake victims instead of real ones.

This Can Be Funny Too –

One of the most hilarious things that happens is – the scammers go out and create brand new email accounts which are virtually identical to the one we address the email to. Usually we make it something like charles.soludo or mariam.abacha (two of the most popular names the scammers use) but this time we thought we’d have a bit of fun with it. Emails are being sent to the perfect err.. ph@llus. And so far the scammers have created about 50 different versions of this email address! They are very creative about it – I saw one today that spelt ph@llus with 3 l’s.. phalllus, I almost fell off my chair laughing.

Share The Amusement –

I thought today I would show you a few of the emails I have received from scammers over the past few days but I warn you, these scammers have trouble turning caps lock off.. ;)

You foll do not contact me again

TAHNK YOU VERY MUCH I DONT NEED THE MONEY TAKE IT YOURSELF FOOL 4 LIFE.

ARE YOU SERIOUS I NO BE MUGU ABEG

YOU CANT EAT ME IS ME THAT WILL EAT YOU I EAT MUGU MORE THAN YOU COME LET ME SHOW YOU THE NEW WAY

how are you i will want you to send the feels to my name

are u sure this email is for me i do not understand you

This scammer explains why not to email him on the old email account anymore –

How are you today, I received your mail and am happy you received the check, I don’t want you to sent me email to my other address because I just find out that some one is using it which is not me so I decided to use this one by opening this one for private between me and you ok with other name, so I want you to change your email address and reply me from the new email, which i use in sending you this email, so that I can know it is you ok. Immediately I receive your mail I will sent you the bank account information’s you will use and send the money ok.

This scammer doesn’t want the full 6 million dollars which I have to send him. He settles for a much more reasonable amount –

Thank you very much for your update. As soon as the funds have made available kindly proceed and transfer the total sum of £10 Pounds to my friend in United kindom

This scammer thinks I am also a scammer, and apparently not well versed in English. I hope he’s wrong, it’s the only language I know!

Local…………Ur english is not good enough to convince..try and improve from ur local way of composing english. Lollllllllllllllllllllllllllll

This scammer isn’t too sure whether I am legit or not but just in case –

ARE YOU STILL LEAVING THIS LIFE OF LIES AND RECONFIRM YOUR INFORMATION.

This scammer has a tale the likes of which are a little.. unbelievable –

Thank you very much for your email and update. However i think my email address account is being hacked because as i was about to send you a reply after i read your email from my email account, the message disappeared right in front of my very eyes. I was shocked. I do not know why someone will want o hack into my email account but for security reasons i have stopped using the email account and as soon as i am able to get a secure email account i will notify you.

In fact there seems to be an apparent rash of dodgy goings on –

Please I have changed to this email because someone is spying my email, so please be carefull not to send email apart from here.

And this scammer is having troubles too –

You should desist from writing mail to Lu’s email address and stop further communication with him via phone because his phone was bugged and email hacked. Disregard a email from Lu’s email and even calls because the Police is on his trail but with my position and influence as a Bank Excutive, (even though he can’t spell his position so how good can his influence be?) i will make sure thatthe funds is secured for Lu and yourself.

And this scammer is apparently being terrorised by his employees trying to steal his monies –

Ok infect I have been having problem with my employees in our company that wanted to take over my business fund but with God be the glory that the will not succeed with their terrorist act. So I have decided to write you with my alternative mail address so that you can only communicate with me

This scammer is not too sure how soon he can get his stolen from another scammer monies –

I will want to believe that what you meant to say was that the money would be sent by friday of this week and not friday of next week.

The scammers love Western Union but they seem to be never quite sure how to spell it. I would have thought all the time they spend at their local Western Union with those big black and yellow signs that coincidentally say “Western Union” might have given them a clue. Here’s some of the spellings –

WESTAN UNION – western unnion – wester union – westernunion – western uniuon – westan unin – westner union – westenr union –

scambaiting, scams

We Cannot Talk About Sex Before Money!

6 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

One of my scambaiting characters is a model who is just starting to be successful. She just received this email.

GOD DAY

I HAVE SEE YOUR PICTURE YOU ARE OKEY BUT YOU HAVE TO PAY THE MONEY SO THAT THE MONEY CAN BE TRANSFER IN TO YOUR ACCOUNT BEFORE WILL THINK ANYING ABOUT SEX
THANKS

This scammer is certainly very focused on his scamming. The photo he saw was this one.

okey

It happens to be a picture of Heidi Klum, of whom I am a huge fan after Project Runway. I have a whole series of photographs of her which the scammers receive. No wonder so many of them forget all about the scam and write of love because she was then – and is now – absolutely gorgeous not just “okey”, in my opinion.

Like this lad.. here’s a couple of the back and forth emails.. ;) He writes –

Dear, I love you please take it easy, I will send the photo today they are almost ready, and I hope to meet with so soon, I love and will keep on loving, I can’t wait to be on your arm and suck those nice boobs of yours, and make a real love to you. Call me please I miss you and will like to talk with you.

She Replies –

You didn’t reply my last question to you or any other questions I ever asked you.I think you call me but I just miss answer the phone, it go messages. Was that you? You leave message but it was very hard to understand for me.

bank man is all ready as soon as I say the word, so send me your shotts today ja?

You ever did sex on plane? If yes tell me about it, i like to hear of it. I had a little dream about you want me tell you what it was

Don’t you have a spouse? If you could be fond of someone famous, who would you like to decide on and where would you meet? Isn’t it shocking of you not to be feeling debauched? Do you like cats? Why are you being stupid? Does clothing have any effect on your masturbation habits?

He writes –

Dear Thanks for your mail, well I taught that I would have answered your question by phone call, and that is why I called you, if you can’t pick my call then call me.I have never hard any sex in flight, and am not stupid at all, I am a diplomat, I love your pics that was sent to meet and I waiting for an occassion to meet with you, well as you can see I will be glad to work with you and make sure that we becaome good friends and who knows.

actual I like all animals, I had spouse before but now not with her any more. like you said about famous lady, i like you as person and I love to meet you in first class flight, who knows mean be we will consumate it there.Thanks for your question please feel free to ask me more question, and try to pick your calls, I will send my pics I am trying to get some erotic and exotic ones.

Oh, he’s a diplomat.. that clears it all up then! ;)

As you can see they do not know they are corresponding with a computer and not a real person.. I wrote this particular baiting script over a year ago, and since then it has emailed thousands of scammers. They all get slightly different variations with the wording and the questions the computer asks them and what the emails say to them.

Note – these aren’t tools that regular humans can get access to – this is something only long time scambaiters can use. So if you want to use it, get into baiting – when the time is right you’ll be given access.

scambaiting

Snoskred Answers Some Questions.

6 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

There’s been a recent rash of question asking and answering around the blogosphere. I put up my hand to be interviewed by Emily, and I got these questions. I changed the order around a bit, sorry Emily! ;)

1) How did you meet the Other Half?

Online, oddly enough. This was many years ago in the beginning of the internet. I got into online gaming – playing Quake. I went to a network game party one night. For those who don’t know network gaming requires you to take your computer along and they all get plugged into each other and then you play games against each other.

Back in those days the internet was too slow to play games over it, like people do these days. And there was my other half, who I knew virtually right away was my other half, strangely enough.

2) You read a lot of blogs regularly. How do you choose which ones to read, which ones to comment on, which ones to link to, etc.?

I read probably 95% of blog posts which arrive in my reader.

I would link to every blog post I read, if it was humanly possible. Sephy will tell you, I’m forever pasting links to blog posts to him in Skype. I have to make do with linking to every blog that I read in the sidebar, and then I have to be very picky about the posts I choose for the weekly wrap up, otherwise there would be 500 links and none would get clicked on.

So the bottom line for me with those weekly wrap up posts is – a post has to stand out, touch me in a major way, make me think, make me want to share it with other people, make me go “Oh, what a great idea” or “I’m going to do that” or “That’s brilliant!”.

Commenting is difficult these days. I don’t have as much time as I used to for it and I hate that, because I want to comment on probably 95% of the posts in my reader.

3) I (and I bet a lot of your readers) know nothing about NSW. What are five things someone who has never visited would be surprised to know about your home?

a. New South Wales = NSW

b. The capital of New South Wales is Sydney, which might be the most famous city in Australia, however it is not the *capital* city of Australia. The capital city of Australia is Canberra – which is completely surrounded by New South Wales. Nobody knows why or how this odd arrangement came to be. Well probably some people do but I’m not one of them.

c. I live on the South Coast of New South Wales. There is also a North Coast. All of these coasts are located on the East Coast of Australia. Yes, it is quite confusing!

d. New South Wales is home to the Funnel Web spider, which mostly lives within a 20km radius of Sydney itself. These spiders are able to stay alive underwater for up to 30 hours by trapping air under their hairs, or something. So I was told, but it was on a documentary tv channel so I am assuming it is true.

e. You can probably tell, I don’t know much about NSW. ;) That is because I grew up in Adelaide, South Australia. That’s about a 15-17 hour drive from here.

4) For those of us unfamiliar with Scambaiting, can you tell us how it works? And how are you able to get compensated for all your scambaiting efforts?

Scambaiting is really pretty simple. You email a scammer (from a safe email address like gmail which does not show your location to the scammer) pretending to be a real victim. You play along with their scam, pretending you are going to do what they want you to do.

You ask a lot of questions, you make a lot of promises, you let them begin to dream of the money you’re supposedly going to pay them. If you have the means you use Skype to receive calls from them, which costs them time and money. I don’t talk to them on the phone much anymore but they call me constantly.

When they’re hooked on the dream, you keep stringing them along as long as you can. I’ve known scammers who have been strung along for well over 12 months. You’re always just about to pay them the money – but there’s an emergency, there’s a problem, there’s another question they need to answer.

I like to make them fall in love with my characters – usually using photographs of models like Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks. As those characters I pretend to be a virginal, extremely rich, naive girl who is looking for her perfect man. My character might be a model just starting out, she might be a singer, she might be a minor celebrity, or she might have family money. The scammers think everyone in the USA is a millionaire, so they believe it.

When they have fallen in love, I like to take their heart and crush it into tiny little pieces, like they do to their victims. The girl might find out he is a scammer. She might find a man closer to home. She might be on her way to meeting them at the airport in their country and the plane somehow falls out of the sky. I make newspaper clippings (it’s easy and simple to do) which support the story. If my character dies, it turns out my character has left them money – and they have to jump through hoops to get it, fill in forms, take photographs, etc.

There is no compensation for it, sadly. It is like any hobby, you have to put a little money into it. I pay 30 euros a year for my Skype In number, I pay around $80AUD a year for my post office box. Both of those cause a lot of anger and frustration to the scammers, so to me it is worth it. ;)

5) How did you get into scambaiting?

A scammer was silly enough to send me an email asking to borrow my bank account, I googled and found one of the scambaiting websites and began to bait them. Soon after I started I found my “first husband” and within a month I was “engaged” to six scammers. It was sometimes difficult to keep the stories straight, and tell them apart when they called. Strangely, none of these relationships worked out!

Thanks for asking me the questions. If anyone wants to be interviewed by me, just leave a comment and ye shall receive 5 questions of various goodness. ;)

Emily is hosting the Hump Day Hmmm this week as well – the topic is – something you experienced that affected and affects you. Feel free to join in the Hump Days, they are an excellent way to blog, I find.

About Snoskred, Australia, scambaiting, The Other Half

Goodbye To A Good Thing.

19 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

There was a day in May, 2005 when I simply could not get out of bed.

I thought everything was fine in my life. I had a great job, one of the highest paying jobs I’d ever had. I got that job after I was treated very badly at a previous job. That’s a story in itself. The bottom line was, without knowing it I was very depressed and also without knowing it, I was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. That’s what my psychologist diagnosed, several months later when I finally managed to get some help for myself.

The day after the day I could not get out of bed, I found I could not get out of bed again. This went on for three weeks, until I finally had to admit I couldn’t go to work anymore. I resigned, and the dark hole I know as depression sucked me back in for the second time in my life. It is painful to think about that time, and it is painful to think about how I dealt with it.

I needed something to make me feel good about myself. I looked for reassurance in the wrong places. It was a huge mistake. It went on for several months like a roller coaster, until finally I hit rock bottom. I made up my mind. I was going to complete the one task I had to do, and then I was going to return home and take my own life. Whoa, that is hard to admit to you guys.

Please note, I am fine right now. ;) Though I am well aware that I could find myself back there again in the future I am better equipped to deal with it now, and I would seek help rather than keep it to myself in the future.

How it is that I am sitting here now? A very good online friend of mine from Ireland who knew what I was going through and what I intended to do had the guts to call my family and ask them to get me some help. My family was shocked and I don’t think they believed how bad it was, because on the surface I seemed to be functioning fine. I was just keeping up appearances – and there might be someone around you right now who is doing exactly that.

After that happened, I got help. I started seeing a psychologist often at first, then dropping back to once a week. Another good friend of mine saw that I was in trouble, and thought that asking me to help with a project might be a good way to drag myself out of the hole I was in. He asked me to help out with an internet website, and I threw myself into it, heart and soul.

Honestly, that person literally saved my life at the time – though they did not know it – by giving me something outside of myself that I could concentrate on. I firmly believe that, and though they won’t like me saying it, I credit them with saving my life.

Looking back on it now, this was not a wise idea for me. I needed to take care of myself before I took care of anyone else or anything else. It was easy to bury my own problems and issues in order to worry about the problems and issues of a new website. I wasn’t well. I should have said no but it was something I believed in and something I wanted to be involved in. So I said yes, and got to work.

My life started to improve and one thing that helped greatly was The Other Half and I making the decision to move interstate. We had been stuck in a rut for a long time and we needed to shake things up. We began to look forward to that. The new website had been launched and was a big success but I needed to take some time for me and moving, and so I tried to get other people to fill the hole I would leave while I did that. Unfortunately people felt I was being pushy – well of course I was, there was a lot of work to be done and I knew I could not do it, so I had to ask other people to make a commitment to doing it.

It is infinitely easier to do something yourself rather than ask other people to do something. If I could have done it all myself I would have. Simply because to ask someone – can you do this by this date – and then watch them NOT do it, and then have to ask them if they are going to do it and if so, when will they have it done by is one of the most difficult things to do. I sucked at it.

I won’t lie to ya’all. There were a couple of times I honestly went way over the top in how I reacted to people not doing things they had promised to do. It would be easy to say – it wasn’t me, I was sick – but that isn’t the truth. I have to own my part in this. I have to take responsibility for what happened. I was at fault.

It *was* me – me under a lot of stress and pressure, me in the middle of a move interstate which I had never done before, and me not in the most mentally healthy place. Me also – who in early December right in the middle of all this stress and pressure – got kicked off a website I was a huge part of. Me who was trying to deal with that on top of everything else. I did not have the tools to deal with things in an appropriate way.

So I was told by my life-saving friend – go and move, we’ll deal with everything, when you come back everything will be fine – and I trusted and believed them, and did as I was told. However when I did return, nothing was fine. I soon found myself kicked off that site as well, none of the people I thought were my friends would talk to me, including my life-saving friend.

In fact many people had changed their contact information so I couldn’t even get in touch to ask – what happened? I couldn’t see what happened. Once I’d moved didn’t have a new psychologist I could see right away, I had to wait, so I couldn’t talk about what happened to someone who knew the situation like my old psychologist did. It was too fresh, too open a wound for me to see it with any clarity at all. I could only see that I was bleeding and in pain. It was only later that I was able to see my faults.

I was hurt, upset, angry, confused, so many things. It set me back quite a bit as far as getting better was concerned. I said some things out of hurt and anger which only made the situation worse. Then one friend said to me – forget all that stuff. Focus on scam-baiting. You’re good at it. I took that advice and ran with it. I got involved in a few baiting projects and this time I wasn’t so pushy. I didn’t ask anyone to do anything, if I couldn’t do it myself it did not get done.

Time passed. A lot of time. I got over it, got better, got plenty of therapy, got healthy again. I thought other people had built the bridge and walked over it but they had not, and they kept proving it to me by writing some very hurtful things to me that had nothing to do with what was being discussed. When they wrote their words were designed to wound, to hurt. However it didn’t wound or hurt me because in the wounded place I had a healthy scar.

It seemed to me that a lot of people were stuck back in January 2006 and instead of becoming less angry with me as time went by, they became more angry with me. It also seemed that some people were taking delight in playing people off against each other. They would tell me something that someone else said, which I would later find out that person didn’t say – and vice versa. Only nobody ever came to me and asked me – did you say this? They just assumed it was the truth.

I became the person who caused all the problems. Anytime something went wrong, the blame was put on me though most of the time I wasn’t involved in any way! At first I tried to fight it, defend myself, but after a while I realised there was nothing I could do about it. I just let it go over my head and I kept baiting.

Other friends of mine were upset by it, and many of them walked away from the websites where it happened as a result. They kept telling me – leave, you don’t need that kind of stuff in your life. But I hung in there, hoping that by showing these people I was not angry at them, that I didn’t hold a grudge, that I had built the bridge.. maybe one day they would forgive me for my past mistakes and accept me as a useful member of the community. After all, I never killed anyone, right? Everyone makes mistakes, right? Surely people would get over it in time.

Early this week something happened that I did not agree with, and I said so. The amount of anger that came to me as a result of expressing my opinion totally shocked me. It should not have shocked me because it had happened so many times before, but each time I was naive enough to think “It will be different this time – more time has passed, surely they have got over it by now, surely they can see that it is not them personally I have a problem with but their actions”.

It was then that I decided the only way these people I once loved so dearly (yes, loved, though I never told them so) were ever going to get over this was by me removing myself from the equation. So earlier this week I said goodbye to a website I believed in and loved as much as I would have loved a site I owned myself – a site I had promoted, driven traffic to, and a site where I wanted very much to be an active part of the community. I will not deny I shed tears over it. I asked them to close my account, and they did so.

It was not an easy decision to make, but I had to do it because I couldn’t stand to see the people I once respected so angry at me. Still, after all this time. And if any of the people from that site are reading this now, I just want to say – I’m sorry. I hope my leaving means you can heal that anger and hurt that clearly I caused you to feel. I hope one day you can see that I cared about you and I miss you, my once-good friends. I wish you all the best but most of all I wish you peace. I wish that you will take that anger and throw it away, rather than transferring it to the next person who makes a mistake.

I remember the good times, not the bad. It was a good thing for a while there. I have forgotten every unpleasant thing ever said to me, and I forgave the people saying those unpleasant things a long time ago.. As it says in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice – “But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself.” – And this is the last time I will mention it here on the blog. The book is closed, and I won’t open it again.

I’m not the same person I was two years ago. In fact it is almost the exact anniversary of when I made my decision to take my own life. I am so glad now that I did not, and that is one reason I have written this, as difficult as it was – because if there is anyone out there having those thoughts I want you to know that help is out there, you only have to ask for it. And it does get better. Honestly, it does. You just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

It is time for me to move forward. I’ve put the depression firmly behind me now and I know the warning signs to look out for so I don’t go back there again. It is time to look to the future, and I do that with open arms and an open heart.

It is time to focus on the good things I have in my life, and there are so many of them – including all of you who read this blog. I thank you for being here, it means a lot to me.

It is also time to begin the work to move this blog to WordPress. I have put aside next week for learning to use it, basically a week of WordPress training. Hopefully within two weeks I will have made the switch, but I’ll let you all know more about that as the time gets nearer.

embarrassing stories, people talking about you, scambaiting

Internet Scams – How I Make A Difference.

8 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

This week the Hump Day Hmmm topic is a tricky one. How I Matter is this week’s topic. There are many subjects I could have written about but I chose the one I’ve been involved in for almost three years now – online scams, scammers, and how to protect yourself.

butter4

A Scammer Poses To Join The Holy Church Of The Sacred Butterfly

Snoskred Is Educational –

There are many email scams out there in the world. I try to educate people about some of them in order to stop them from being scammed. These scammers are criminals. If there is something I can do to stop them, I’m sure as heck going to try.

What Is An Email Scam?

There are many types of email scams but let me sum it up simply for you.

Someone you don’t know and never heard of before is contacting you by email to tell you they have money for you.

An Important Point To Remember –

NO MONEY is coming to your email inbox as a surprise.

Variations On A Scam –

Someone you don’t know and never heard of before is contacting you by email to tell you you have won the lottery.
Someone you don’t know and never heard of before is contacting you by email to tell you they need to borrow your bank account and they’ll pay you a large sum of money to do this.

Stay At Home Moms Watch Out!

Someone you don’t know is contacting you by email to tell you they have a job for you, or you apply for a work at home job on a legitimate job seeking website. You may have heard of the company because the scammers use legitimate companies to make their scams seem real. I know you want to be able to stay at home with the kids but getting scammed out of money is not going to achieve that. Always check independently if you can – don’t use the number the scammer gives you.

Online Sellers Watch Out!

Scammers often use Ebay, Craigslist and others in order to find people they can scam. Usually this will be a fake check scam but sometimes they may try to wire stolen funds into your account, use stolen paypal accounts or stolen credit cards and the list does go on. Be very careful. Get educated on the scams they try to use and how to protect yourself before you start selling.

fpic5

A Scammer Poses To Show His Love For My Character

What Does Snoskred Do About It?

The number one thing I do –

is talk and get the word out – here on the blog, in the media via radio and press interviews which I have done many times in the past, on various scam victim support websites.

The second thing I do –

is hook the scammers up with a special *baiting tool, which keeps them busy with fake victims rather than real ones. Recently I have been a little busy and neglected this somewhat but I intend to get back into this over the next couple of months. It isn’t difficult. I have the tools all set up and ready to bait, I just need to hook scammers up to the machine.

The third thing I do –

is bait fake checks out of the scammers. I then contact the companies on the checks and warn them that the scammers are using their account details. Do not try this at home, ya’all. I use a safe PO box which my name is not attached to in any way to receive the mail. These scammers are criminals who have been known to kill their victims.

The fourth thing I have done –

in the past but currently am not involved in is warning actual scam victims. Some of the victim support websites receive information about people being scammed – from friends or family of the victims, law enforcement, web hosts who take down the scammers websites and sometimes from very brave people on the inside of these scammer gangs who do not like what they see – they email us victim email addresses, phone numbers or street addresses.

Some might say that I do this one to feel good about myself, that’s baloney but occasionally it does feel good when you have called at the right time to stop someone being scammed. Some might say I do it to help the victims, well that is partly true – it is a side effect.

Sometimes it works and the victims listen to me. Sometimes it does NOT work and the victims get angry and abusive towards me because they have grown to trust their scammer. That is tough to take. That is one reason I am taking a break from it right now. You can only do it so long before you burn out.

The real, deep at the heart of it, reason that I do this? To stop the scammers from making money out of people who are vulnerable. I don’t want them getting a cent from their scamming.

The fifth thing I did –

I took three months out to volunteer full time to assist when the Fraudwatchers website was launched. I truly believed in what they were doing – I still believe in it, I just had a falling out with the management there about the best way to do things – and the Fraudwatchers site sadly no longer exists.

Why We Know Our Actions Are Working –

Currently there is a major denial of service attack against several of the sites which bait scammers and sites that support scam victims. It has been going on for roughly two weeks now. They would not go to all this effort if we weren’t putting a major dent in their income. Unfortunately this means many of the scam baiting and scam victim support websites have been offline for extended amounts of time.

How You Can Help –

– Tell your family and friends about the scams, and ask them to speak to you if they ever wonder if an email might be legitimate.
– Stumble this post to get the word out about these scams to more people, if you’re a stumbler.
– Link to this article in my internet safety series which speaks about these scams.
– Ask me via email to guest post on your blog on the topic of scams to help educate your readers.
– If you know anyone who has any questions about these scams I am only an email away. However there are some great websites on the internet that try to help as well though some of them are currently offline due to denial of service attacks – Scam Victims United – Fraud Aid – Scamwarners Is This A Scam Forum.
– Let the readers of your blog know about the Scam-O-Matic – a web form which can look at an email and tell you if the email looks like a known scam. Is this email a scam? Ask the Scam-O-Matic –
– Become a scambaiter. 419eater has a mentor program where they will train you to bait scammers safely and with no danger to yourself. I will warn you, it is an addictive hobby. :)

Further Reading –

– Snoskred Made 5 MILLION DOLLARS Online This Year!
– Snoskred on Fake Check Scams and Scambaiting

Snoskred’s Internet Safety Series –

Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four – Part Five – Part Six

Over To You –

Have you ever received an email you thought might be a scam? What did you do about it? Have you known someone who was scammed out of money?

*Note – these aren’t tools that regular humans can get access to – this is something only long time scambaiters can use. So if you want to use it, get into baiting – when the time is right you’ll be given access.

fake checks, Internet Safety, job scams, scambaiting

Aww Poor Scammer!

5 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I don’t do much scam-baiting anymore, it is all done by the baiting tool which automatically baits the scammers on my behalf after one simple mouse click to hook the scammer up to the computer program. ;) Note – these aren’t tools that regular humans can get access to – this is something only long time scambaiters can use. So if you want to use it, get into baiting – when the time is right you’ll be given access.

This scammer below has been corresponding with a computer since March 2007, he celebrated his six month anniversary a couple of days ago. He sent this email.. which I censored the swear word in on his behalf. After all, I am sure he does not want to offend ya’all.

my babies mama am really happy to hear from you again,i really miss you so much i dont know the reason why you left me in this f**ked up country after all my effort to get the money from you i gave up.you are suppose to know that i really want to come meet with you but you dont believe me i want to be in your house and i want to be the one to dip inside you forever but i dont trust you yet because we have to see eachother face to face.

can you visit me in nigeria?

reply this email today after reading and endeavour to call me after you finish reading this email ok

i love you sweetheart

The computer replied –

Hot CakesI remember how you wrote the day we met. Your writing filled me with laughter and something about your pants immediately put me at ease. You have an amazing style and grace, and I could stare at your pants endlessly. I am ever foraging for your magic mushrooms and your enormous cock.

Do you believe in destiny? I only feel complete when we spoon and fork each other. I only want to knife you for the rest of my life. I fondle you more than anyone will ever handle you. I moon you more than Uranus. If I could spend a day with you, we’d enjoy each other’s company. We’d hold hands as we strolled in the sunset, and we’d talk about everything.

I hope you understand that I’ve loved you once, but now, I don’t love you enough to share you my most intimate moments with you. Your teeth are like stars, they come out at night.

Love,
Sweet Peanut

Yes, that is the kind of email which has kept this scammer happily in love and ever begging for money for months now. A lot of the love scam stuff I grabbed from a poetry site which had blank words in the poems, and myself and a few other scambaiters filled in the blanks with the least appropriate words possible. ;) There’s a lot of lines with pants in them, partly because we wrote that in there a lot, and partly thanks to this list I found on the internet –

Top 278 Star Wars Lines Improved By Replacing A Word With “Pants” – My favourite, number 95 – “I sense a great disturbance in the pants.”

There is a lot of different languages with phrases taken from online phrase books, especially the Zompist phrase book, which contains phrases you would not normally find in phrasebooks, and They Thought You’d Say This which contains unusual phrases found in phrase books.

But to cap it all off, there are 250 questions about Masturbation. I consider this one of my finest moments as a scambaiter finding those questions at Jackinworld (be warned, don’t go there if easily offended by discussions of masturbation). The scammers have been enjoying these questions for some time now. The above scammer was asked –

How regularly do you like to have sex? Have you ever succeeded in masturbating to orgasm without stimulating yourself with your hands?

He replied –

i like having sex everyday what about you?
i have not ever succeeded in masturbating to orgasm except when a woman is beside me.
am long to kiss you thigs and suck your nipples.i miss you baby.

Well gee, I’ve never had my thigs kissed.. ;) If only he weren’t a scammer! I have a suspicion he doesn’t have a woman beside him too often and therefore I think he might be lying about his success rate there.

This is the kind of thing that keeps scammers busy, wasting their time instead of their spending that time on a real potential victim. Once you set it up, you can forget about it for the most part and yet still be keeping scammers busy.

scambaiting

Will You Be Scammed With An Online Job Offer?

5 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I’ve already made 5 million online this year, so I’m not looking for any jobs online. If you are looking for work online, you need to read my guest post over at I’ve Tried That so you can avoid the scams.

Snoskred on Fake Check Scams and Scambaiting

Don’t forget to pass the message on to your friends and family. You won’t forgive yourself if they get scammed and you had the knowledge to stop it from happening.

Let your friends and family know about the Scam-O-Matic – a web form which can look at an email and tell you if the email looks like a known scam. Is this email a scam? Ask the Scam-O-Matic.

job scams, scambaiting, scams

Snoskred made 5 MILLION DOLLARS online this year!

44 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

thecheck

This article is a must read, not because I’m going to tell you how you can make your OWN 5 million online but because I have some very important information for you.

What I want to talk to you about is how NOT to make money online.

I currently have 5 million dollars worth of fake checks in my possession.

In some countries these are called bank drafts, or cheques*. Truly, I do have them. I’ll give you a link to take a look at them a little further down the page and there’s some photos here in this article too. They came to me from scammers on the internet, who I scam baited – that means I pretended to be a real victim.

I don’t suggest you do the same thing but I do suggest you read this article and please help me to get the word out there on the internet about this scam and other scams. Below I talk about some of the ways you can help.

Something you may not know about checks –

When banks say a check has “cleared” they simply mean the funds are available to you.

The funds being made available is no guarantee of the check being good.

A check can bounce up to a *year* after you bank it.


Seriously! The funds are available to you because in many countries (e.g. the USA, Australia and others) the funds have to be made available by law, however if it turns out to be counterfeit or stolen or the issuer does not have sufficient funds in their account the bank will quickly make the funds UNavailable to you. If you have spent the funds, they will put you into the minus – and charge you for that as well, usually. If you did bank a fake or stolen check at first it would seem to clear, the funds would be there for you to withdraw and spend.

Don’t trust that teller –

You might even ask the teller – has this check cleared, and you would usually be told YES – absolutely it has. Just like most victims this happens to. They do not get training in this area. In fact most people who work in banks don’t know how checks really work. The scammers DO know how checks work and they make full use of this lack of education.

How you get the fake check –

– A scammer might email you with a work at home job offer like a payment officer, a company representative or book keeper.
– You may apply for a job you have seen advertised.
– You may be selling something online (possibly via Ebay or Craigslist or Etsy but these scammers will try anywhere you can sell things).
– You might be a breeder of dogs, cats, any animal – they will pretend to want to buy one of the animals.
– You might have a rental house or holiday home and they pretend they want to rent it from you.
– There’s thousands of other possible scenarios but essentially it boils down to someone you don’t know wanting to pay you.
– They don’t just use checks either – they may offer money orders or travellers checks.
– Often they will send a check for more than the item you are selling is worth, and they want you to send the balance back to them. They will use many excuses for doing this.
– They may send you a check and once it has cleared they will no longer want the item – someone in their family will be ill or die and they need the money back urgently
– They will usually want you to send the money by Western Union, Moneygram or deposited into a bank account they give you.

When you send the money –

So the check has cleared, and you figure everything is fine if the bank says the check has cleared. Some victims have even asked to have it in writing, because they were so sure the check would *not* clear. Victims have been given confirmation in writing only to find having something in writing from the bank won’t help when things go wrong.

Within days, weeks, months, up to a year later the bank will find it was counterfeit or stolen and they will take the money back and hold YOU responsible. In the US, you could actually be arrested for check fraud. Many scam victims have been – an example and a good article here.

About my checks –

The Nigerian 419 scammers have been very helpful to me because they have sent me an awful lot of fakes – fake checks – cheques – bank drafts – money orders – travellers checks. Some good, some terrible. When I started out trying to collect a few fake checks I thought it would be cool to hang them on a wall, sort of like a gallery of fraudulent instruments. And so I did..

ce3

I now have so many I would need to actually devote a room full of walls to it. These are in addition to the ones hung on my wall already. I laminate them so they’ll stay in good condition.

smalls

bigs

Here’s a bit of a closer look at the 16 new fraudulent instruments from scammers I just laminated today. Click on this picture for a much larger view.

alltogether

You’ll note there is a lot of pink painting done on these checks – that is because scammers only need a few vital details in order to counterfeit a check. These are generally your name and your bank account information. When that information is present on a real-looking check, the bank will always pay it! The scammers don’t need to steal checks, they just print them out.

NEVER give out your bank details online.

Many companies have their details available on the net in case you want to make a payment to them – and scammers take full advantage of that. They make checks with the details of those companies and often these checks take the longest to bounce – it isn’t until the accountant spots the transactions later that the bank will find out the checks were not written by the company. That is why most of these checks have company names on them. I always contact the companies whose names appear on the checks to let them know what is going on.

How Snoskred baits check scammers –

– I use a safe post office box which cannot be traced back to me – do not try this at home, readers, for your own safety. These guys are criminals. Giving them your home address to send fake checks to is NOT a good idea.
– I use a special tool to bait the scammers. This involves minimum effort on my part. The tool does all the baiting for me. All I have to do is click my mouse once, and then checks come to me as a surprise in the mail. The tool takes care of all communication with the scammer, writes the emails, sends them, and it is truly amazing.
– If you want to try baiting scammers, websites like 419eater and theScambaiter have mentor programs which can get you baiting safely. Please don’t try it without knowing how to stay safe. Nobody wants a scammer turning up on their doorstep.

Just one other note..

about assuming scam victims must be stupid.. ;) Don’t assume, it makes an ass out of you and me, as the old saying goes.

Thousands of new people visit the internet for the first time every day. Many of the new visitors are elderly or have just retired and figure now is a good time to find out about this newfangled internet. These people have their entire life savings just waiting to send to a scammer who gets in and hooks them before they know it is a scam. Many scam victims are stay at home moms who are looking for a bit of extra income. Many are new to computers. Just because YOU are aware of these scams does not automatically mean everyone else is.

People fall for these scams constantly and it has nothing to do with intelligence or greed or any other things like that. They simply have not been educated that these are scams. The scammers are always thinking up new scams, so never think YOU are safe from being scammed – they might try something on you that you haven’t heard of yet. This happens to experienced internet users daily. Nobody is 100% immune – don’t fool yourself into being fooled by a scammer.

You have to realize these scammers work full time on these scams – this is what they do for a living and they know how to get money out of people. There’s another problem in that people associate Nigeria with these scams – and the scammers know this, so they pretend they are elsewhere in the world. So some people who know about NIGERIAN scams think – this has nothing to do with Nigeria, this person is in the UK, US, Europe, Australia, it must be ok.

Many scammers use FREE services like this to get a UK telephone number which redirects to their Nigerian mobile phone. So a victim calls a UK number to speak to them – never knowing their call is redirected to Nigeria. These free services are available for most other countries too.

The scammers are criminals, and the victims are victims of a crime – and they are unlikely to report it because people will think they are stupid. This means our law enforcement people cannot get an accurate picture of how big a problem this is.

Make sure you tell your friends and family about these scams – if you assume they know, you might find out you are wrong. If it happens to someone you love, you’ll realize I am right, it’s not about intelligence. It’s about lack of education – and YOU have the power to educate them.

How YOU can help!

– Mention today’s blog post on YOUR blog so all the readers of your blog can be educated on this important topic. Feel free to link to this post.
– Link to this article in my internet safety series which speaks about these scams.
– Ask me via my contact page to guest post on your blog on the topic of scams to help educate your readers.
– If you know anyone who has any questions about these scams I am only an email away. However there are some great websites on the internet that try to help as well – Scamwarners Scam Victims United – Fraud Aid –
– Let the readers of your blog know about the Scam-O-Matic – a web form which can look at an email and tell you if the email looks like a known scam. Is this email a scam? Ask the Scam-O-Matic –
– Stumble this blog post with Stumbleupon, if you are a member.
– Email a link to today’s blog post to your friends and family.
– Now you know about this scam – there are so many others out there. Always ask if you’re not sure. The Scamwarners forum “Is this a Scam” is a good place to post a question you might have.

Further Reading And Viewing –

Avoid Fake Check Scams: Five Things You Should Know
Fake Check Scams
More About Job Scams – A Guest Post By Snoskred
About the 419 Scam
Scam Victims United
60 Minutes Australia – The Big Sting – story transcript of a now missing video story, well worth reading.
60 Minutes Australia – The Big Sting II – story transcript of another now missing video

For those in the USA –

Consumer group warns of growing check scam.

Please note this quote in the above article by the executive vice-president of the American Banking Association: “Federal law requires banks to make the funds you deposit available quickly, but it’s important for consumers to know that just because you can withdraw the money doesn’t mean the check is good,” said Edward Yingling, executive vice president for ABA.”

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

If you had never heard of these scams before, if you or someone you know has been scammed, or if you have any thoughts on this topic, I’d love to hear from you. Comments are closed but you can contact me via email – or comment on one of the more recent scam related posts on this blog, which you can find under the Scams category, click here for the most recent scam posts..

* I apologise for using the word check though here in Australia we call them cheques, I’m so used to emailing US scam victims on this topic and they don’t know what “cheques” are usually. ;)

Updated 27/02/2015 – to remove dead links and put in replacement links

fake checks, scam victims are not stupid, scambaiting, scams

What will a scammer do for money?

6 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Almost anything you demand, it seems. Previously in my other scambaits, I’ve got them to p@int butterflies on their f@ces. pose naked, hold a sign, and hold my characters photograph. Other scambaiters have gone even further. It is now getting difficult for me to think of new things to ask them to do.

But one day I was a bit bored, I had some spare time, and so I wrote a new baiting script and hooked up a few lads to it. I don’t do any baiting manually these days, it’s all done with tools that make it mostly automatic for me. Note – these aren’t tools that regular humans can get access to – this is something only long time scambaiters can use. So if you want to use it, get into baiting – when the time is right you’ll be given access.

Scammers complain wildly when you ask them to do something for you instead of you just rolling over and sending them money by Western Union or Moneygram or into their bank account.

They practically cry.

They try to negotiate their way out of what I’m asking them to do.

They bargain.

They tell me they’re under house arrest, or don’t have a camera and need me to send money to buy them one, or they want me to send my photo to them in the same pose before they will do as I ask.

They then search the internet for photographs of what I have asked them to do and send that to me, pretending it is them. No way, I can google too, you know. (that’s why I put the @ in p@int f@ces, so they don’t wind up here!)

So today, less than a month after I set this script up, I got my first *real* photo back. I’d asked the lads to p@int their f@ces like Gene Simmons from Kiss, and this lad did make a little bit of an effort.

gene1

It’s a bad quality pic but I am reasonably sure it is genuine. I’m going to rewrite this script and see if I can’t get some more lads to do it. :)

scambaiting, scams

The Assasination Scam

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

Sephy got a great example of the newest weapon used by the 419 scammers yesterday. His baiting character – a very famous sports person who I can’t name for the scammers can google too – is apparently being stalked by a spy team in preparation for the execution team to arrive and kill him.

How does this scam work? Basically they threaten people into giving them money. The scammers tell victims that they have been paid money to kill them, but if the victim pays money they will not kill them. Of course the scammer does not even know who they are, where they are, or anything like that – he’s just taking a chance that this email will freak them out and make them pay money. Can you imagine an elderly person getting a threatening mail like that? Of course they pay. ;(

You can see the threat email for yourself here – Sephy’s Platzish –

scam victims are not stupid, scambaiting