Aiding scammers

By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics and access other forums reserved for members. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today by clicking here.

Master Baiter Joined: 03 May 2011 Posts: 237

After much deliberation - and admittedly a little bit of trepidation - I have decided to bring up the issue of the potential threat of scammers being helped. It is widely accepted that there are baiters out there who pretend to be scammers, in order to waste scambaiters' time. These are known as 'badgers'. I cannot for the life of me see their motivation, other than to cause trouble and obstruct the mission and ideals that we as scambaiters subscribe to. That is, of course, to waste scammers' time and protect potential victims against these scum. The fact that a fellow baiter would go against the grain of his or her community is appalling, and it saddens me that someone would do such a thing; knowing all to well the behaviour and mentality of 419 scammers. As I have said, it is beyond my comprehension as to the mentality and motivation of 'badger' baiters.

Another thing that has sat uneasily with me for some time now, is the possibility of an actual scammer being in our midst. It is not entirely unlikely, but then again not very likely at the same time. Some lads are more savvy than others, and it is for this reason that I cannot shake the feeling that we may have one or more of them in our anti-scam community. That said, however, I think the more likely scenario is someone who is not a scammer, but is actively aiding and abetting - educating - the lads. I am not accusing anyone, and nor am I suspicious of any particular user. Furthermore, this is not my attempt at cooking up some conspiracy theory in order to stir moral panic or attract sensationalist attention; I am simply pointing out that it is a very distinct possibility.

Simply imagine how easy it would be for a user to compromise, or even flat-out sabotage an ongoing, successful bait. All it would take is a quick registration, then that person could proverbially hide in the shadows - the wolf in sheep's clothing, so to speak - and act as a spy for the scammers. It is indeed a sobering thought to imagine the lads being actively educated; being kept up to date with baiting modalities, and generally become more successful as a scammer. It would be very easy to do; and while as I've said, the motivation is incomprehensible, well, such is the way of life at times.

It would be interesting to hear others users' thoughts on the issue.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 1:28 pm

Personally, I doubt the existence of badgers, at least many of them. What would be their motivation? Baiting takes time. We do it because we hate scammers, but why would anyone spend time baiting baiters?
Eater and Scamwarners do get scammers joining, and are weeded out.
out. Probably not all, but it's not a problem. Scammers have no interest in alerting other scammers to what we do.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 1:31 pm

Mr Tambourine Man wrote:

Personally, I doubt the existence of badgers, at least many of them. What would be their motivation? Baiting takes time. We do it because we hate scammers, but why would anyone spend time baiting baiters?

Great question. I guess a disgruntled ex-Baiter who has left a site under a cloud.

Interesting Thread. Will be watching this one.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 1:33 pm

Simply remove identifying information during ongoing baits - Change your lad's name and hide his email address. Share information only with trusted members. I have a very productive lad - a veritable one man pig farm - who will appear in Published fairly soon but until then I'm keeping it all on the QT.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 1:39 pm

I think I already voiced my suspicions on another thread, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if the more hi-tech scammers would actually monitor this forum. Maybe the African's can't understand our motivation, but for example vlads could. Especially if it's a team efford, where the whole bunch of spammers who spam the original messages, scammers who scam the victims, mules who receive the money and probably someone overseeing the whole operation all work together, mob-like.

The mob goes where the money is, and in this case it's relatively safer to scam people out of their money than say, collect protection money, extort or hit banks. This forum, for example, could be seen like an adversary from the mob boss' point of view and if DDoSing doesn't help, they could just keep on monitoring us and report possible ongoing baiting activity to whoever does the actual e-mail exchanging.

Baiting Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2011 Posts: 21158

^^^I have found out that Vlads do scan this site. I've been uncovered by my first few. I'm keeping my current one under wraps for now. My last one found my thread within a few days.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 1:55 pm

Mr Tambourine Man wrote:

Eater and Scamwarners do get scammers joining, and are weeded out.
out. Probably not all, but it's not a problem. Scammers have no interest in alerting other scammers to what we do.

When people join Eater, the MODS watch who signs up and often times what is considered to be a scammer is weeded out immediately as Mr. TM opines. The MODS have their system of "weeding" out. (Asking exactly how they do that could be dangerous to one's health, so I don't suggest asking. Laughing

Now there might/could be "lurkers" (those who have not registered) and view the forum as a "guest"; however, without registering, they cannot read the things that are behind "log ins" (such as Help, Hints, and Tips).

Overall, when posting up, it is a good idea, as N-gunny suggests to change the lad's name, your character's name and other pertinent information such as email addys, etc or just xxxx'ing out that information.

Having said that, as we opine "Always bait safe" and we could also say "Post safe" also.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 2:07 pm

I watch my kids play online video games. There always seems to be people who like nothing more than to take their high level character and run around killing all of the 'newb' characters. Thereby ruining the game for new players before they even get started. Their enjoyment is the knowledge of the anonymous frustration they are causing others knowing they are ruining a $90 game a kid maybe received as a present etc. Not unlike the pleasure most of us get from knowing we are driving the Lads crazy (albeit for what I hope are more altruistic reasons).

I think it is totally believable that somebody would get a kick out of reading this site then deciding he would want to trick and waste the time of Baiters. I could see somebody wanting to make a mockery of the complicated and clever plans we act out. I reckon the motivation for these guys would exist, what I am not sure about is how they might acquire the skills and experience to deceive experienced baiters. I couldnt see there would be a large community of these folks sharing information and training newcomers or hopefully somebody on here would have heard about them.

In terms of trolling the site, through my work (which shall remain nameless) I was given a demo a few weeks back of a tool that does nothing more than compile a summary of 'open source' information. It was amazing, not targeted in the baiting world but I could see the close applicability. Smarter folks out there with the ability to aggregate open source data would be able to find out loads about us, many of us do exactly that to the Lads.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 5:27 pm

I think a good tool to weed out possible scammers from this site would be this thing I heard of called S3curity $hield.

You should check it out...

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 6:08 pm

While it is all well and good to be paranoid about stuff like this, if you simply change the identifying details of your ongoing bait (not simply leeting since that might stop google but it won't stop others from figuring it out), then you have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Baiters who post up their ongoing bait must take responsibility for doing so - understanding the risks and how simple it is to prevent any problems.

Your lad's name is James? Post it as Juan each and every time. If they are claiming to be from Barclays bank, change it to Acme Bank. And so on. If you do this one simple trick, how in the world can anyone else -- baiter, badger, spy, lad, vlad, etc, ever know who the lad is in your bait?

Be paranoid if you want. Most lads and vlads aren't here and aren't going to waste their time with something they don't understand. Are there badgers? Maybe a few in the whole wide world (which is pretty big), but it is so easy to stop them from interfering in your bait if you are really worried about it.

Baiting Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2011 Posts: 21158

Quote:

Baiters who post up their ongoing bait must take responsibility for doing so - understanding the risks and how simple it is to prevent any problems.

My first Vlad/love bait actually brought a few people in here. Even though I was busted in the end, I felt it was better that I may have prevented some from falling for it.

I don't think I have too much to worry about with my current one. These pics are definitely not going to work well.

If they are using modeling type pictures, I'm posting my work as it goes. If I get busted I've really lost nothing!

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 8:46 pm

I don't think there are scammers actively monitoring the forum and warning other lads. That would require time and time is money, and lads don't like to spend either.

Lads have posted here in the past when they discover their own scam being discussed. Usually, they can't quite figure out what we do. Some have claimed that THEY are being 'scammed' by the baiter that is wasting their time. Some have indignantly denied wrongdoing and demanded that the bait be removed. None that I have seen, have indicated that they grasp what our community is really about at all.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 9:05 pm

There is no question that more sophisticated lads/gangs are aware of us and see eater as a dangerous adversary. I had just started reading here and getting interested in baiting back in 2007 (I think) when eater came under a DoS attack. This site was shut down for quite a while - long enough that I lost interest when I couldn't access this site. I don't know much about how a DoS attack is done but I suspect it isn't something your average yahoo boi can pull off.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 9:36 pm

About the DoS attack, it's not something your average yahoo boi could pull off, and it would, in fact, take loads of yahoo bois and their internet connection to even dent Eater (even though Eater probably was smaller in 2007). I doubt any lads would be that organized. At least not in those numbers.

Since DoS attacks is basically about killing the connection to the server, by simply stealing bandwidth, until the server is unable to handle any real request and, depending on the severity of the attack, might go offline for some time.

.. As far as I remember from the top of my head.

In short: No, it would take way too many people to pull it off for it to be lads.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 9:47 pm

bluebaiter makes some really good points about badgers. About their motivation and about their skill set to trick an experienced baiter. To me they are like the pink unicorn of baiting. I've heard a lot about them but never seen one.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 9:48 pm

The DOS attacks are usually the uphappy vlads. Laughing

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 9:59 pm

^^Well thankfully I use windows on my computer. They can't attack my DOS.

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 10:21 pm

Of course it's vlads. I should have known. Haven't baited one yet, but I've heard they're more competent, tech savvy and organized than our run of the mill yahoo bois.

419Eater is my life Joined: 12 Jun 2005 Posts: 442

When I was new to these forums in 2005 (yeah, time flies!) I was doing some other volunteer work for an extending period (now I'm back). Back in '05 I remember the general paranoia of badgers.. and honestly... they are so exceedingly rare, I don't know if there have been any confirmed sightings since I came here. There was one.. only one a handful of us old schoolers remember. There are trolls, but trolls will usually just go away.

I have learned it is not even worthwhile to worry about being baited by a non-lad. The actual probability is just too low.

Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 6:42 am

TheProbie wrote:

About the DoS attack, it's not something your average yahoo boi could pull off, and it would, in fact, take loads of yahoo bois and their internet connection to even dent Eater (even though Eater probably was smaller in 2007). I doubt any lads would be that organized. At least not in those numbers.

The traditional DoS-attacks with couple of angry dudes flooding the server are long gone as many hosting services have virtually unlimited bandwidth. But the DDoS-attacks again are a problem. The very same trojans that send out most of today's spam, can also be used to make a massive DDoS-attack. When you have hundreds or thousands of zombie PCs doing your bitting, taking all the target server's bandwidth isn't a problem any more. They've done it to several high profile companies in the past few months and smaller sites wouldn't be a problem if they'd get really angry.

The bots themselves have also progressed lightyears from the early versions that just infected the PC and connected to IRC, waiting for instructions. The modern ones use encrypted communications and P2P-networks to communicate, removing the single point of failure, such as an angry IRCOP killing the channel hardcoded in the bots.

Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 9:09 am

^ Thanks for the reminder. I still have doubts that lads have the tech savvy to have loads of zombie PCs under their command. If they did, Eater would be down quite often.

I have been following what's been going on to several big sites, where it looks like Anon has been attacking, but there are both numbers and zombies behind those attacks.

And I'm well aware that the bots work better than just going through a hardcoded IRC (if they didn't, it would be really easy to shut down).

I still don't believe a yahoo boi, or a lot of yahoo bois could pull this off.

Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 10:01 am

TheProbie wrote:

I still don't believe a yahoo boi, or a lot of yahoo bois could pull this off.

I don't think your average lad would do much more damage, than curse your soul and claim he can make your balls turn cubic and fester at the corners.

But majority of 419 spam I get, is from botnets, so there is a connection between kids who run the botnets and lads.

419Eater is my life Joined: 18 Jan 2010 Posts: 357

hrmmm...you guys seem to be suckering me out from the shadows more often lately with these interesting topics.
Although this account is fairly new(took me a long time before i finally registered) I've been lurking here for a while, just reading threads, and I seem to recall(although sadly I cannot locate the link) reading a thread where a baiter had uncovered a badger, and said badger had even ended up posting in that thread. By following various links and such mentioned in that thread I discovered there was a whole subculture(albeit a small one comparatively) of these badger guys.
I don't pretend to understand or approve of it, but they're certainly out there, and at least some of them lurk here to find their "victims."
(which only emphasizes more the need for newbies to get a mentor I think since I recall the badgers would generally look to prey on the new folks) at any rate, I was somewhat disgusted by the whole thing. In terms of motivations, I suppose some people are just asshats.

Master Baiter Joined: 03 May 2011 Posts: 237

Quote:

I don't know much about how a DoS attack is done but I suspect it isn't something your average yahoo boi can pull off.

I'm inclined to agree. Performing an effective (read: taking a server down) DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack does not require much computer savvy to pull off; it does however take a lot of computers working together simultaneously. Your average West African scammer has neither the knowledge nor the organisation to pull this off. Even if he did, it would be of no profit to him, and therefore not worthwhile.

Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 7:38 pm

@boofles - is this the thread you're looking for?

@Man of many names - good point. That hasn't crossed my mind.

@Cpt. Tripps - That's true. Thanks to a certain group of people, which shall remain unnamed, there's a lot of software that makes this easy.