A fake company to play around with spammers and you can use it too

Years ago I got into a deep conversation with a gift card scammer over the phone. We talked for almost 30 minutes about the inner workings of the scam and the exchange rate of gift cards to local currency. Eventually I asked him why he doesn’t leave his country for more opportunity as he was clearly intelligent with strong English skills. He explained that a passport in his country cost thousands of US dollars. I told him that in the US a passport costs $100 every 10 years and he was shocked! It clearly upset him. At that point he said he had to go as his manager was coming. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that call.

This seems like an anti-scammer fantasy. I’d like to see some examples of the stories that are created out of scammers following these procedures. Just stats like how many made it through each stage will be funny.

It seems like it won’t be very effective in saving the poster time as they’ll get the same number of messages. But any time spent by scammers at least is less time on others. However, I suspect scammers have lots of free time because they cast a wide net with spam and then reply back to every single person who responds. So they will still interact with the same number of people, they will just waste more time and go home later. My understanding is that most scammers are in very poor nations so scammers working long days is pretty cheap.

It’s different from synchronous spam like telemarketing where occupying a scammer does literally reduce the amount of time someone else would get.

Reminds me of instances where I played with Craigslist scammers who sent fake PayPal emails and asked to ship to countries like Nigeria, Sudan, etc. I used to create a new usps label (and request refund later) and give it. When there's no activity i asked them to call the post office and speak to them. Used to be fun

This will work for a few days until the 419ers update their scripts to filter these out. To succeed you'd need a lot more domains and scripts, and ask for overly specific but plausible information that takes time for attacker to provide. These guys aren't dumb; they run efficient operations.

"The benefit of this is that you won't have to chase people, or go from one person to another to find someone who can help you."

Brilliant

someone should set up a script or something for mailinabox for example. that way people who are doing selfhosting can just do this on their own domain so it looks more plausible?

question. if scammers do "realize" this technique and block you, would that mean a signal for them to not bother this guy? or what?

Something like this + procmail (or similar) + GPT-3 would be neat to see.

Clever. So the rest of us just need to send a single reply with that first email address to set a chain of events into motion since the scripts are already set. Hah

Reply all podcast has a cool episode where they go down the rabbit hole tracking down a scammer in India.