A New Sport - Part II

If you missed yesterday's post about scambaiting, and the rules of the game, you may want to go and read it - and take a quick spin by the linked site advocating this game - before continuing. Because while the New York Times article played up the light-hearted aspect of this passtime, and my post did too, some of the posts on the "419 Eater" forum are deadly serious - and it occurs to me that I don't want to give you the impression that I'm taking this pursuit lightly...

As noted on their FAQ, most of the hard-core scambaiters aren't doing this for fun. Some of the worst of the Internet scams have had terrible consequences for the people who fall for them, including people who have bankrupted themselves, gone into crushing debt, or even become homeless because they believed what some random yutz on the Internet was telling them. The worst cases are the ones that pop up right after any major natural disaster, claiming to be relief organizations that will use your donations to help people who've just been left homeless (or worse) by hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes and the like. Others will come up with the most pathetic tear-jerking sob stories and send them to literally millions of people, hoping to nail that one-in-a-million person who will fall for their sad (fabricated) story. And no, most scammers are neither poor people who need the (stolen) funds in order to eat nor crusaders attempting to right past (or historical) wrongs; the majority are simply criminals, and many appear to have links to organized crime...

What struck me about the scambaiter forum wasn't the glee that some of the participants were taking about making scammers try to bite their own backs - although there were many such posts - but rather the comments about how every time one of these "lads" gets played by a "baiter" (as they call themselves) he will be that much more cautious before sending out his next reply, and how every hour that a scammer spends responding to "bait" messages is one hour he can't spend preying on actual victims. It has become clear over the last decade that no amount of government action or law enforcement efforts can ever eradicate Internet scams, but as I read through the baiter literature, it seemed clearer and clearer that if you had enough scambaiters, they might be able to stem the tide - and if somebody could find a way to make scambaiting as profitable as the scams are in the first place, that might actually bring enough people into the fray to change the whole picture...

Now, I don't mean to suggest that scambaiters are cyberspace superheroes, bravely fighting back evil criminals who would wreck pain and suffering on innocent (if occasionally gullible) people for their own selfish ends; I'm sure a lot of the baiters are just doing this for fun, for personal satisfaction, or for the enjoyment they get upon seeing a picture of a cybercriminal with a large fish over his head in the mistaken belief that this will get a scam to work. But on the other hand, if you've ever wondered if the popular image of hackers as electronic vigilantes - Robin Hood with a laptop - is ever actually true, I think we can now say with some confidence that sometimes it is. Out there in the deep blue reaches of cyberspace there really are a dedicated corps of men and women who are donating their time towards making our world just a little bit better than it was when they woke up this morning - defending the defenseless and destroying (or at least seriously inconveniencing) the forces of evil...

They may not wear tights, leap tall buildings at a single bound, or strike terror into the hearts of evildoers, but I'd be pressed to call them anything other than heroes just the same. Maybe there's hope for this Internet culture of ours after all...