How did u get into it

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Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 11:53 am

I had a female LAD add me to msn one time a few yeasrs ago and did the exact thing as on here

Started off being all nicey nicey then seocnd or third chat said she loved me and needed money to get out of nigeria

i teased and wound her up for around 9 months then got bored and dropped her

i did not even realise this site existed then and was just doing it for the fun and keeping occupied lol

how did all u guys get into this

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 12:09 pm

I remember it was a rainy Saturday afternoon Cool

. I was innocently browsing the off topic arena of one of my favorite aviation forums when some nefarious member posted his humorous comments about the dastardly deeds of some heretofore nameless scambaiter. I hesitated, I clicked on the link...... Life has not been the same since.

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 12:15 pm

A friend showed me an article about the Scamorama site - and I followed a link from there to 419 Eater.

I don't remember what the weather was like but I'll bet that somewhere in the world it would have been a dark and stormy night...

Elite Baiter Joined: 28 Feb 2007 Posts: 1731

I was advertising some property for sale on the internet and had a couple of offers on it. The communication with these buyers did not make any sense.

Who buys land without looking at it and offers more than the asking price? I started searching and found eater.

Wannabe Baiter Joined: 15 Jul 2008 Posts: 84

I found this place from a link in a webcomic forum. Laughing

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 1:08 pm

I'll take you back in time. We're writing the year 2006 Wink

. My kid brother had his notebook up for sale on an ebay-like website. He got a bid way over the market value, but the item had to be shipped to Nigeria, where the son of the buyer was supposedly studying. We smelt a rat of course and simply declined the offer. I never heard of the noble art of scambaiting at the time, it just seemed to be a good idea to set up a phony email account to see if he would be interested in my $6000 non-existent brand laptop. He was, and we had a lot of fun baiting that mugu. After that one ended I was hooked, and started Googling on internet scam related topics. That's how I found the Eater. The rest is history Laughing

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 1:09 pm

I love these threads.

Hackthissite I think. I didn't spend much time there, I could never be bothered to learn more than basic HTML.

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 1:18 pm

Quite a few years ago I read an article by an undercover journalist who was posing as a lonely heart.
She reckoned that she had placed an advert, and over one weekend had more than 100 replies, with the vast majority of them coming from African men that later tried to scam her.

So I did the same thing, and sure enough was inundated with replies from Nigeria and Ghana.

I started to reply to them asking them to prove their love by writing me poems or sending me photos or even singing a love song for me on my voicemail.

At the time I thought I was probably the only person on the planet that was playing this game, until during a chance conversation I was told about a website that had lots of hilarious stories of people doing exactly the same as I had been doing.

I don't remember the name of that website now, the only thing I remember about it was a great story of a scammer who fell in love with Lady Penelope the cartoon heroine from Thunderbirds.

When I'd read all the stories on that site I started to search for more of the same, and one of those sites that I stumbled across was 419Eater.
Which I must say was far, far superior to any of the other sites that I viewed.... Wink

So I signed up, discovered that what I had been doing for years, was called baiting, and started to be absorbed into the baiting community here.

The rest is history........... Wink

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 3:15 pm

I dealt with a couple of Love Lads from a dating site. No way would they have gotten any money from me, because (1) I don't have any money to give away, and (2) I'm a tight-fisted little slitch. But I had heard of the Dead Bank Customer scam (had gotten a few of those emails, in fact, and laughed at them), so I thought I'd see what else was out there.

A search on Google netted me the information that the scams were lumped under the moniker "419" - so I did another search on that. You guessed it - one of the first sites to come up was this one. I started reading - the Abeche safaris and the VVahab saga were the first ones.

I am working up the chutzpah to try my hand at baiting - I don't usually just jump into the deep end, so I'm studying the stickies and learning from the masters.

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 3:24 pm

I learned about baiting when reading a question posted on AskMetafilter.

Quote:

I have a 60-year-old female friend who is single and spends a lot of time on dating sites. She seems unaware of the risk for fraud and scams. She's fallen into a travel scam with a "man from Louisiana working in Uganda" and just wired $110 to a third party. She's both totally convinced and stubbornly attached to the "relationship."

One person suggested they tell the friend to call her lover "Mugu" as a pet name. Several people responded with links here and to romancescam.com, and I followed. This place is great. I haven't read everything yet, but I've read a LOT. I hate these jerkballs, especially the romance and charity ones. I applaud the wit and tenacity of the baiters!

I have my first few baits going now and it's so much fun. Mr. Green

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 May 2007 Posts: 18313

In April 2007, I had never even heard the term "419". A friend emailed me a link to 419Eater, saying, "Here's something I think you would get a kick out of". For about two weeks I read the letters archive and forum every night. I starting baiting, and registered here a week later. Life has certainly not been the same since. Very Happy

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 3:34 pm

I have been known to sell musical equipment on a site called Harmony Central. I constantly got emails from foreign buyers offering me $3k for a $2k amp. They would always send their checks right away. So, I used to mess with them. Then, people around my office started getting a kick out of it. Someone ran across Eater one day and forwarded it to me. Here I am today.

Baiting Guru Joined: 08 Jul 2004 Posts: 11857 Location: UK

Like others, I used to get scam emails, I would either delete them or send back a load of verbal, but one day, after eceiving such an email, I decided to do a bit of research on it, that led me to a an anti scam forum where one of the members called, Klass, pointed me in the direction of 419eater, I liked what they were doing here, decided to join, and I'm still here Rolling Eyes

Not quite a Newb Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 41

I was sent snail mail at work.

Not quite a Newb Joined: 05 Jul 2008 Posts: 64

Reading The Register I came across a few stories of 419 and the Lads from Lagos. Google brought me here and the terrible triplets tale of torment kept me long enough to sign up. Just starting my own first bait.

Master Baiter Joined: 25 Jun 2008 Posts: 123

i got annoyed at getting scam emails and decided to search the web to see if there was any way of getting back at the bastards. I found this site and browsed it for a day. I went on my way and for the next year or two i didnt really think about scam emails again until recently i got one that annoyed me. i did a search, found this site again, read the adamu safari and loved every minute of it. It convinced me that baiting wouldnt necessarily get boring after a few emails so i signed up and have hung around for about a month so far. I'm enjoying it and imagine i'll stay around for a very long time (hopefully i might actually get good at baiting while im at it!)

419Eater is my life Joined: 10 Jul 2008 Posts: 366

In real life I own a company with an internet presence as part of our business. We have several layers of spam filters and some scam messages will still get through.

For a while, I was taking down some phishing scams by tracking down the re-direction links mostly to compromised websites that forwarded information and then passing the details to the appropriate people.

My interest in 419 started with responses like, "This must be my lucky day I heve just won 3 lotteries and someone else wants to send me $3.4Million and to top it off you just offered $18.0M".

Most recently I have been focused on how to seriously fight back. There are victims that are scammed out of cash and there are victims whose business address and identity are used.

A few days ago I talked to a craft shop whose address was being used in fake shipping scam. It was seriously impacting her business. We see this a few times a year in simple ways when support@..., info@... and sales@... accounts that never send emails are spoofed as return addresses.

p.

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 4:45 pm

When I was growing up, in the 1990s, my dad occasionally got letters addressed to his business from Nigerian scammers. He kept some of them as curiosities but never responded.

I was trying to get out of an apartment lease a while back and advertised it on craigslist. Not long after, I got a guy who was willing to pay the entire year upfront, provided I forwarded part of the cash to another guy via Western Union. I played along for a while and got him to waste time and international shipping charges, but that was the end of that.

Not long ago, I was watching "To Catch a Predator" clips on YouTube, and noticed a couple other specials by Chris Hanson: "To Catch a Con-man" and "To Catch an ID Thief". The trails all ended in Nigeria. I was curious as to why so many scammers were from Nigeria, and did a little research on the Internet which led me here. Smile

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 5:12 pm

I was looking and looking but in the meantime (1 3/4 years have passed) the German Wikipedia entry on "scam" does not link to the computer magazine article from c´t any more...that one linked to scamorama. From there on I found the Ar$e Clowns Football Club Website, Frank Rizzo´s 419 and then Shiver´s baits...a bit later it struck me that that site had a baiters´ forum. Laughing

I was not doing anything else than reading for many months; I simply liked these battles of wits.
Before I was reading a lot on the Degree Confluence Project...I wonder whether a lad could be told that he needs to get a GPS and find the spot 10°E / 40° S, right there lie Saddam´s millions...

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 5:14 pm

I went from HERE to HERE to HERE to HERE

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 5:18 pm

I was a long term lurker at Scamorama.com, and thoroughly enjoyed the humour, when I came across a link to this site from Martin Lewis's site (moneysavingexpert.com). I popped in here for a while and realised that this site also had the humour BUT also had a very proactive approach which I appreciate. Plus I feel comfortable her, so I do.

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 7:14 pm

I had a LOT of time on my hands. Some one gave me the link to "bustedupcowgirl" and I got interested did some searching, found Stu_Pidas's site and really got interested and found Eater. Much like writeon above, I like the proactive approach along with the humour. I also like that there is an element of science here and the interactive aspect of Eater. Very Happy

Annoying Stuck-Up Cow Joined: 10 Aug 2006 Posts: 222

Read up on the P-P-Powerbook! thing that happened on Something Awful, follwed some Wikipedia links to scambaiting, 419Eater was listed as a website, came here. Looked like such fun, I couldn't leave it alone!

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 8:19 pm

Over the last few months I have been getting quite a few scam mails. At first I was kind of freaked out about it, but I got over that and just started deleting them. Then one day I read a few and started saving them. They were amusing, but never that convincing of course (except for that one FBI email that had me going for few minutes).

Then last week at a point in time in which I was particularly pissed off, I got another scam email. Seeing an opportunity to vent my frustrations on an unsuspecting person, I fired off a particularly nasty response.

After that I did a search on Google of "responding to scam emails", because I wondered how often people did what I did. From there I was led to Wikipedia, which led me to baiting, which led me to an article about 419eater and Shiver MeTimbers' antics....which, of course, led me here.

Not quite a Newb Joined: 22 Jun 2008 Posts: 35

For me, I stumbled upon it about a month ago and have had no free time since.