Scam baiting

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Scam baiting is the practice of pretending interest in a fraudulent scheme in order to manipulate a scammer. The purpose of scam baiting might be to waste the scammers' time, embarrass him or her, cause him or her to reveal information which can be passed on to legal authorities, get him or her to waste money, or simply to amuse the baiter.^[1]

Scam baiting emerged in response to e-mail based frauds such as the common Nigerian 419 scam.^[2] Many websites publish transcripts of correspondences between baiters and scammers, and also publish their "trophies" online, which include videos and images scam baiters claim to have obtained from scammers.

The primary goal of scambaiting is stopping 419 Advance fee fraud, which bilks hundreds of millions of dollars from victims,^[3] and leads to victims committing crimes to raise enough money to feed the fraudulent schemes.^[4]

[edit] Common elements

Simply wasting the scammer's time by pretending to be a victim. If the scammer is talking to a baiter, they are not talking to a legitimate victim. In “Conversations with a Nigerian Bank Scammer”, writer Karl Mamer documents verbose “conversations” over email with several Nigerian 419 scammers. After statements like “Marco, my good and soon to be prosperous friend, you have correctly intimated from my writings on religion and Elvis that indeed, like you, I whole heartily [sic] agree that the separation of church and state is both unnatural and ungodly”, “Marco” finally says “I am so scared to meet you with this amount of talking”.^[5]

A common practice amongst scambaiters is to ask the scammer to do something in order to prove their identity or their intentions, such as send a photograph of himself or herself in a compromising position^[6]

A small number of baiters have convinced their scammers to send money to them, although the actual occurrence of this is disputed. Tom Craig, a former Scotland Yard officer, says that it would be unprecedented for 419 con artists to part with money and suggests that scam baiters could easily forge the scanty "evidence" of such successes.^[7]. Other baiters have succeeded in getting their scammers to send them art or other "trophies" as evidence of completed work for the baiter, which is, of course, never paid.

In a paper titled “Scamming the Scammers - Vigilante Justice in Virtual Communities”,^[8] Lauri Tuovinen and Juha Röning of the University of Oulu, Finland address the ethical issues of Patrick Cain's “Internet's First Blood Sport”^[9] . They also use the term “digilantism”^[10] to describe the subculture of scam baiting and vigilante justice on the Internet.