Artists Against 419
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Artists Against 419 (commonly abbreviated to AA419) is an Internet community dedicated to identifying and shutting down 419 scam websites.
The site was set up in October 2003 and began tackling fake banks in an artistic way: by hotlinking their images to drain their small bandwidth allowance over their monthly limit. Over time the fake banks evolved and so have the Artists. On November 30, 2003, the Artists Against 419 hosted the first international flash mob. There have been many subsequent flash mobs designed to make hosters aware that the internet community will not tolerate hosters knowingly hosting criminal websites.
At the same time, they started to list the fraudulent sites that members had found, so that potential scam victims would see their website and be warned when looking for the sites to which the scammers direct them. This list now contains more than 10,000 websites (as of November 20, 2006), and is one of the world's largest databases of fraudulent websites.
Sophisticated tools are used to search for fake sites. Once a site is proved to be fake, it is entered into the database, and the hoster is contacted with the evidence and asked to close down the fraudulent site. Frequently, fake sites are closed within days of being set up. As great care is taken to check each site before it is listed, the AA419 website is increasingly used by law enforcement agencies as a source of information.
AA419 has good relations with many webhosting companies who themselves have no wish to host dishonest sites and cooperate willingly by closing down the fake sites once the evidence is presented. However, a few companies fail to respond to even the most solid evidence, and in such circumstances AA419 arranges a flash mob.
[edit] Flash mobs
A flash mob involves large numbers of individuals who each go to the fraudulent site and download pages of information. Several hundred people doing this repeatedly cause a rapid drain of bandwidth thereby exhausting the site's quota, so the site goes offline. In some cases, particularly where a small webhosting company is involved the volume of traffic can be so large that access is slowed to all sites on the server, but as soon as the hoster pulls the criminal site, things return to normal. No site is flash mobbed until at least two letters have been sent to the hosting company warning them that they are hosting a fraudulent site, detailing the evidence and requesting that it be pulled for violating the hoster's terms of business. The Artists would far rather webhosters cooperate to clean up the web, and a flash mob is used as a tool of last resort.
The artists have had considerable success in closing these sites, since out of the 10,500 sites listed in their database, 583 are still active and some of these will be very recent additions (as of November 20, 2006).
[edit] References
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