A New Sport

Almost from the very beginning of email we’ve all been dealing with the mass mail messages commonly known as “spam” in reference to an otherwise innocent potted meat product. We’ve talked about the ethics of using such techniques in this space before, and the debate continues as to whether there is (or even should be) any distinction between commercial email messages used as a legitimate marketing technique and fraudulent messages that exist only to scam people out of money and/or personal information. But regardless of your feelings about spam, the big question remains what to do about it. An entire sub-industry of software systems intended to detect and screen out spam messages has sprung up in recent years, and modern email systems are devoting more and more effort to diverting such messages to specialized “spam filters” – or rejecting the messages altogether. I’ve always wondered if there was some way to harness these missives for good purpose, either for commercial gain or personal satisfaction – and a story I ran across today suggests that there might be…

A recent technology column in the New York Times online told the mildly amusing story of a common email scam – a message from a friend or acquaintance claiming that the sender is stuck in London and needs your help to get home after having their wallet stolen – and an exchange the author had in which he tried to provoke various responses from the sender. It’s a variation on the old game of trying to get a telemarketer to react in various ways while tying up their time on the phone (trying to convert them to your religion, telling them the sad story about having your heart broken, threatening suicide if they don’t keep talking to you, or asking lots of questions about their pitch and then hanging up), with the added bonus being that email scammers will say or do almost anything if they think there’s the slightest chance of you sending them money. It seemed like a novel way of harmlessly wasting time until I read the comments at the bottom of the page…

It turns out there is an entire online community of people who participate in this kind of sport, informally known as “Scambaiting,” with their own forums and discussion boards (such as 419 Eater, a reference to the section of the Nigerian Penal Code that deals with email scams) offering detailed ways to make online scammers do interesting things for your own amusement. In particular, there’s an entire section of scambaiting which deals with trying to get scammers to send you a picture of themselves naked (or at least of someone very attractive in a state of undress) in return for the money which you will not, of course, ever have any intention of sending. While most people in the community acknowledge that the odds of ever gaining anything of value through these games is really no higher than your chances of actually making money by going along with an online bank scam, there is still a certain amount of personal satisfaction to be had from making these Internet criminal do silly things for your amusement. In addition, I think it supports an argument I’ve been advancing for some time now about the way in which our world is changing…

I’m not sure there ever was a time when the average person would have wired an extravagant sum of money to a bare acquaintance on the basis of a voice they might or might not recognize on the telephone, or the postal, telegraph or email equivalent; but if there ever was such a time, it appears to be ending now. Gradually, as time goes on, even the completely credulous, the utterly stupid and those suffering from dementia will fail to fall for this type of Internet scam, and both the criminals and those who take amusement from baiting them will move on to other pursuits. And while I am generally in favor of the world wising up, being more responsible and paying closer attention, it’s hard to deny that we’re also losing our innocence and becoming a colder, harder, and much more hostile world…