HEADS UP for all fellow baiters – this is not a game

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Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2011 9:01 am

When I first started baiting, I was naturally a bit intimidated by the idea of playing with criminals - but I wanted to accomplish these great things of which I read on eater before.
After a while you start to notice that you dish out some ridiculous stories to the lad and sometimes you can even get away with the most absurd excuses. The Lad is perhaps even willing to road trip to a fake meeting.
At some point - at least for me that was the case – it becomes hard to take the Lad as a real person. It's almost like an online role-playing game. You will find hundreds of new mails in your own catcheraccount every day and eventually you can no longer imagine that anyone falls for this nonsense.
Especially the typical 419 formats such as “Refugee girl”, “Next of Kin” and “trunk box” appear too absurd that someone could actually believe.
But one should be aware that scammers would not send out these mails, if it would not bring money. Formats that do not have good prospects of success are discarded, however. The Hitlad is such an endangered species - here we baiters have probably played a big part.
Of course, victims of Rental Scams and employment formats are going to pay faster - but a victim that has swallowed the NOK story can be milked for an incredible long time.
And they are out here! There are probably not as many as in romance or cheque scams but they are real and they mostly stuck very deep in the story.
I could not imagine myself, until a fake banker presented me a paying victim as proof of his legitimacy. She was a lady from the USA and believed the whole Dying of Cancer, fake barrister and fake banker story.
I forwarded her info to the mods and it was the first time I paid attention to our sister site WWW.SCAMWARNERS.COM.
There you can find the real victims, and luckily they can find us too.
I just can recommend and visit scamwarners once in a time to remember that baiting is more than an online role-playing game.
On this occasion one could post the formats of the lads with which he is currently busy and give potential victims having doubts on the story the opportunity to find help.
It is not the same fun as with eater, but it is very rewarding – I promise.

Master of Master Baiters Joined: 26 Sep 2008 Posts: 689

People get into baiting for all sorts of reasons, they stick with it for changing reasons.

How you bait or at what level of seriousness you go about it is all part of that.

Wasting lad's time, thwarting them in most ways, shapes and forms is all good.

When you stop enjoying your baiting hobby (that's what it is to a baiter) then you might as well stop baiting.

More power to the good people at Scamwarners, to site killers and bank account piggy getters!

More power to the straight baiters
More power to the safari baiters ... tattoers, carvers ....
and to those that do it for fun or just to insult a lad or two.

The more the merrier!

Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2011 12:25 pm

Well said

Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2011 12:29 am

A great reminder Baitsamurai. ScamWarners does put the damage these vermin do to real people. People who live next door. People who are your friends or family.

Scammers don't care who whey hurt or how much damage they do to a victim. They only want the pay day from the victim. Victims are devastated financially, emotionally and have lost their family and often their will to live.

I agree we need every kind of baiter activity to slow down the damage that is done every day by scammers.

Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2011 12:58 am

Hi Baitsamurai, Smile

Quote:

Of course, victims of Rental Scams and employment formats are going to pay faster - but a victim that has swallowed the NOK story can be milked for an incredible long time.
And they are out here! There are probably not as many as in romance or cheque scams but they are real and they mostly stuck very deep in the story.

See my thread, Scammer gets 19 years.

The romance scams have increased to 70% of scams. According to Australian detectives.

Cheers

Baiting Guru Joined: 10 Oct 2003 Posts: 4747

Scamwarners does have an impact. I post there regularly. I’ve gotten a number a vics and a few mugus who have responded to my posts.

I believe a baiter should be well rounded, they may focus on one area like strait baiting, but they should also do a bit of posting on warners and kill a few sites regularly.

A somewhat balanced approach really PO’s the mugus I know from experience. Twisted Evil

Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 10:54 am

^^^ It definitely does have an impact. For instance, just this morning I got a PM from a former victim who several weeks after she dropped the scammer was contacted by him out of the blue. Not unheard of, of course. But I suspected that he must be out of cash to start going back to his archive.
So I had a look at the view count of her thread: 405 while the average view count of a romance thread ranges between 10 to 40.
Obviously several hundred targeted ladies had found ScamWarners and after reading the warning had told the scammer to bugger off! Mr. Green

And now he's so desperate for cash that he is getting back to his former victims.

Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 12:23 pm

Great reminder BS. Another bump for posting scripts over at Scamwarners. If you have time to only do a few a week try to do it. It's really amazing how much that helps people avoid scams. I've had several potential victims PM me because they found the threads there and were able to avoid it and those are just the ones that took the time to PM me.

Baiting should be fun. The thing is you may not know what you will find fun until you try a few things like site killing and such. It's kind of like investigation work.

Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 4:52 pm

Good reminder of our reasons for doing what we do, well put and always worth repeating.

Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 10:21 pm

bravo95 wrote:

Another bump for posting scripts over at Scamwarners...I've had several potential victims PM me because they found the threads there

It's an astute observation. I recently posted a script at SW for the first time. It was a love/dating scammer, which I now consider to be just about the most vicious - and viable - type of scam.

Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 9:02 am

^^^... and we get to know only a percentage of what is actually going on. A lot of victims are too embarassed to go public. Sad

The problem is that not only do they themselves feel that they have been foolish, most of their friends give them the same feedback.
I realised that after some time dealing with scams I start to think "Why, that's so obvious, how could anyone fall for it." Sadly, we tend to forget the limited experience a lot of internet users have. Then take into account that victims who go on a dating site often are in a vulnerable state of mind after a loss - and the scammer scores a hit. Evil or Very Mad

Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2011 1:36 pm

Romance scammers are really the worst Mad

but luckily we live in times where most people use google to do a check up about other people, so with posting the name, the email address and maybe even the picture of the scammer we can do alot to protect the innocent...

Elite Baiter Joined: 19 Jun 2011 Posts: 1066

Word, word, word. I relatively new to this but I got hit with a bit of sobriety recently. I was having a blast with the usual romance, trunk box, next of kin scams and thinking "Hey, this baiting thing is a lot of fun." Then I caught what I thought was a typical gold bait. But instead of asking for money, he just went straight to telling me to book a flight and meet him in Ghana to complete the transaction. I realized that the plan would be to kidnap me and hold me for ransom, if I were a real victim of course. That brought me back to earth pretty damn quickly. And don't get me wrong, I'm still having fun messing with him. It was just a good reminder of how serious our work really is, you know, beneath all the giggles and laughter.

Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2011 10:34 am

G'day Baitsamurai,

Interesting posts from all on this thread. The reality of it all is that we are "playing" and the scummers are criminals. Face to face many of us would turn tail. With our advanced education, superior software, better technology and mutial assistance, we will often succeed in wasting the scummers resources.

Basically these lads are as intelligent as we are. It is only a lack of knowledge that makes them appear stupid. Do not mix up itelligence and knowledge.

Lads have the same ability to do what we do. Its simply that they have not been given the opportunity. Educate them and there is a dangerous situation.
Their culture is a very competetive one. It is fair game to cheat another for their own benefit. In the advanced countries it is frowned upon.

Nigerian cyber cafes is big business. Lads do not have the finances to own a computer or have the internet connected. If cyber cafes were to be temporarily suspended when scammers wre found to be using it....Hmmm.
However a bit of a dream of a perfect world. I am sure, however that the cafe manager CEO or even the caretaker of the cafe is well aware of what is going on. It is illegal in many countries to allow the use of a "tool" for criminal intent.

Cheers Smile

Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2011 10:52 am

Baitsamurai wrote:

It's almost like an online role-playing game.

It is an on=line role-playing game, but that isn't a bad thing. Apart from wating a lad's time, you can hurt him by closing bank accounts, closing fake sites, and reporting stolen credit card details.
I got involved after reading some scambaits and thinking "I could do that". Now, hurting lads and giving support at Scamwarners is my main motivation.

Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2011 11:41 am

Nothing against a good safari. The main benefit in it might rather be the entertaintment aspect of a very serious problem, which is often the spark to get people/citizen/net surfers interested to read more about it.

I like how getting ONE single victim out off the hands of a scammer is worth to his wallet likely several thousand dollars, if not tens of thousands. IMHO this is the best way to hurt scammers Smile

on a close second being the mightily annoying fake site killing and account reporting Twisted Evil

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