Sydney 419 Scammer Jailed 193
kjots writes "The ABC is reporting that the Sydney District Court has sentenced a disability pensioner to more than five years in jail for his part behind a Nigerian email scam. One down ..."
To program is to be.
Protecting the gullible? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"disability pensioner" (Score:3, Interesting)
A friend of mine was on a disability pension because he is photo-sensitive. They dumped him off said pension the moment he landed a job, and wouldn't let him back on when he found that he could do the work (because he was photo sensitive).
And even if he is in a wheelchair, I'm sure the judge would have taken that into consideration in his decision (I don't know how well our gaols are set up for sheelchair access).
Xix.
Greed (Score:5, Interesting)
Ideas for frustrating "419" scammers (Score:3, Interesting)
Hopefully these accounts will then be shut down before any potential victim can respond. The fact that the scammers often use a different email address in their follow-up communication indicates that these accounts are indeed often short lived.
I have thought of mail bombing these accounts until they are shut down, preferably with legit looking bogus responses that the scammers have to read one by one, wasting their time and hopefully having them pay for extra online time in their Lagos cybercafe. It would help if each of you would send a response on any scam e-mail you receive (don't use your regular email account).
Frankly I don't have the time and the talent for elaborate scambaiting (http://www.419eater.com/html/joe_eboh.htm is hilarious!), but I am interested in any other simple but efficient ideas for frustrating these scambags.
emails on sale at MercadoLibre (eBay) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Protecting the gullible? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well yeah, in an ideal world.
There are lots of people who are just a bit thick, but to be fair there are also a lot of people out there who are incredibly desperate, probably beyond what the majority of slashdot users could conceive of, and simply aren't quite thinking straight.
From what I understand (I'm not an expert but I've read a little), the people who these scammers appeal to often aren't the people who are simply greedy. They're the people who've been told that they need a $100,000 payment on their home within a month or they and their kids will be kicked out of the home that's been in their family for generations.
Maybe they've been trying to save money and they're malnourished, or perhaps they're getting over an illness that cost a lot of money to treat. (Perhaps they desperately need money to treat it.) It's the same sort of thing as the loner or widower who's sitting at home feeling lonely, and after three months of happiness through online chit-chat, decides to send thousands of dollars to an internet "girlfriend" in another country so she can fly there to say hello, only to have "her" never contact him again.
It's easy to turn around and say that people were stupid to not be careful and give away their life savings to a stranger. But at the end of the day there are still victims and the scammar's still a con artist who defrauded people and often wrecked their lives many times more than they might've been already. If you really feel as if you have have nowhere else to go and the world seems to be falling down around you, it can sometimes illogically seem reasonable to take up an offer like this against any real common sense.
I'm not trying to suggest that everyone who responds to these things is in the same position. Some, perhaps many, probably are just greedy and/or silly, although without meeting them I wouldn't want to pinpoint who. I do think it's short-sighted to simply say that all of these people are obviously stupid, without actually looking at the situation. This is nothing against you personally, but that tends to be the general tone on slashdot and I don't think it's very fair.
This is one 419 prosecution of many (Score:4, Interesting)
This news item is little old. Many nigerian scammers have been prosecuted [google.com].
---
Company scammers who do paid-for posts on weblogs without attribution (i.e. This is a paid advertisement) are criminals and should do jail time for fraud.
Re:Protecting the gullible? (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't understand how the fool got the money in the first place!
US always behind on convicting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Every article you read always comes out of somewhere else.
While I'm at it, here's some more (Score:3, Interesting)
Got Mike [geocities.com]. Mo meets a pretty woman is a classic.
Scan-O-Rama [scamorama.com]
Insolitology [insolitology.com]
Tastes like gold [geocities.com]
Ebola monkey man [ebolamonkeyman.com]. Well worth a read, very funny.
Quatloos, The Brad Christensen Exhibit [quatloos.com]. Check out ROSEMARY KABBAH -- Romancing the Pickle Taco.
and last but not least 419 Eater [419eater.com] which has a personal recommendation on the front page.
Enjoy!
Re:Protecting the gullible? (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's see then. Here are some victims found by a Google search (top links chosen)
Re:US always behind on convicting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy: Because the US is actually way ahead in its laws and enforcement regarding cybercrime, so the scammers always originate in foreign, usually developing nations where the cybercrime laws are extremely lax or non-existent, or the enforcement is so minimal that they have bigger things to concern themselves with than poverty-stricken locals trying to rip off (perceived) fat, lazy, greedy foreigners.
Does that answer your questions?