Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me | Hacker News Reader

Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

notla.com

210 pointsJeremyMorgan139 comments

"If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, the absence of a payment in their account, fake emails from PayPal’s FBI department or just Nigerians in general, then they deserve to have their money taken from them."

I could easily see my parents falling for this. I don't think they deserve to have their money taken.

Although, to be fair, I doubt my parents could set up and use a Paypal account. So they've got that going for them.

Agreed on all counts. To many people, the internet and all are so new and unfamiliar, they have absolutely ZERO context to recognize fake-looking PayPal payments or emails from PayPal's FBI department. To them, they are still completely lost- you can't expect them to recognize a scam.

As for being suspicious of free money, I think most people generally would be, but relax their misgivings when something appears to be legitimate- that is to say, any escapes they are aware of appear to be covered. The scammer, therefore, takes advantage of the victim's lack of knowledge of the escapes in an electronic age.

The Internet has been around for fifteen years, and PayPal has been around for more than ten. I don't think either of them qualify as "new" anymore. Most people get scammed not because the technologies are new, but because they have been using those technologies irresponsibly, i.e. without educating themselves about their dangers first. They simply want to reap the benefits, and end up losing their money.

> The Internet has been around for fifteen years

WWW has been around for 20 years. But it's only recently that people have always on cable modems and active content.

> without educating themselves about their dangers first.

HN is full of stories of well funded, international businesses, with considerable sums of cash at risk, who do stupid insecure things. If they can't get it right why should Joe Sixpack be expected to do any better?

Email inboxes are full of hoaxes about supposed dangers - most of them are garbage.

I'm interested to see what kind of help there is for people who want to learn how to protect themselves on the Internet.

(http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/Internet-Fraud.shtml)

That site has comprehensive information. It's lousy. Look how much stuff people have to wade through.

>>I'm interested to see what kind of help there is for people who want to learn how to protect themselves on the Internet.

What kind of help is there for people who want to learn to protect themselves in real life? Does the fact that there is no comprehensive resource somehow remove one's burden to learn anyway?

You're extremely grumpy. Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept.

People can imagine what it looks like to be in physical danger, and instinct can help them avoid the situations to some degree. It's hard to imagine what it's like being in an unsafe situation on the internet.

>>Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept.

Blaming the victim is bad only if you believe that blame is a zero sum game. Unfortunately, it is not. If you walk down a dark alleyway in New York at night alone and get mugged, the mugger is guilty of mugging you, but you're also guilty of being a silly goose. You don't gain immunity to blame simply because you were the victim.

How 'bout if you just moved to New York from backcountry Idaho?

I would say that a criminal is equally guilty if they commit a crime in a dark alley NYC or if they commit a crime in backcountry Idaho.

If I replace my bicycle u-lock with a nice hefty rope and start lashing my bike to whatever object seems solid at the time (this is a concept that actually appeals to me), then I should receive some blame when my bike gets inevitably stolen. However the bicycle thief is no more nor less a thief.

I was talking about the guy who got mugged. What if he had never lived in the city.

What I was trying to say is that your hypothetical does a good job of showing why blame is not zero sum. Obviously in either case the criminal receives the same blame, but I think it is fairly clear that the victim who took drastic measures to reduce risk is less to blame than the one who did not.

The important thing to remember is that the blame of the victim, while present, has no relation to the blame of the criminal and should never be relevant in, for example, a criminal trial for the criminal. I really feel like I can't emphasis that enough.

I don't think we are talking about the same thing.

Perhaps not. I am just trying to expand upon what enraged_camel mentioned about blame not being zero sum.

No you shouldn't receive any blame. The person doing something illegal should receive the blame.

You are making your life less convenient for yourself by letting your bike get stolen but you're not doing anything wrong.

To expand on that (since I find in this topic it is necessary to be explicit), since blame is not zero-sum assigning an amount of blame to the victim should in no way be seen to reduce the blame or fault the perpetrator receives.

In other words, since blame is not zero-sum, placing some blame on the victim is not a defense of the perpetrator.

You're expanding on my point exactly. The Internet does not have such an obvious dark alley. You can copy HTML/CSS, have anchors with a different href than shown, and a lot of sly things. I hate using anologies when talking to hackers, so I didn't use the alleyway example even though I was thinking it.

>>You're expanding on my point exactly. The Internet does not have such an obvious dark alley.

Not literally, no. But most Internet scams can actually be avoided using common sense, which dictates that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

> The Internet does not have such an obvious dark alley.

http://p3n1zp1llz.48djkhcd.com.shadyurl.info/freemoneyz.exe

;)

Edit: Forgot about this site, but perhaps it could be used as a training tool for family members you feel are not quite as savy as they should be: http://www.shadyurl.com/

Make a page that just says "Grandma, don't click links like that!", convert it to a "shady" url with shadyurl.com, then email it to your grandmother.

A nice idea!

But [urls are disguised so easily](http://horribleurl.example.com). The A element has split the real URL from the text description since forever.

Good point. Training family members to look at the status bar first is probably pretty hard, and probably not even effective. At the very least you would have to train them to recognize and avoid url shortening services...

Why shouldn't you be able to walk down a dark alley in NYC at night? It's not your fault if something happens. With that attitude, we are just tolerating crime and accepting it. If more people walk around at night, the crimes will gain more exposure, be more aggressively stopped, and things will get safer.

The individual has every right to walk down a dark alley, and the group very well may be safer if more people walk down dark alleys, but if the individual is optimizing their behavior for self-preservation (and I think that is how individuals are most likely to act, at least in the 'West') then avoiding the alley is likely the best action

Yea, and if you wear provocative cloths, you're asking to get raped right?

Victim blaming is wrong, period. If you get mugged, you're not guilty of anything. Stop making excuses for people behaving shitty.

In real life I have my parents to keep a watch on me for most of the early part of my life. This takes years of intense involvement, with a lot of teaching about risk and safety.

I have Public Information Films on a variety of subjects:

Tables are dangerous (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icbYf_aR91o)

A collection of terrifying ads (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0xmSV6aq0g)

There are a variety of crime prevention and community safety websites. There are radio and tv programmes with advice about avoiding scams. There are magazine articles (even a well respected consumer law advice magazine "Which?") about scams and consumer law.

All of this is built up over many years and modified when needed.

How are people expected to learn how to keep themselves safe on the WWW? What search terms are they expected to use? (This is when I need Matt Cutts or some other Googler to give us useful stats about the words people use to find information about scams)

How would you know that responsibility is needed without proper education about the dangers?

I used to work as a bank teller while in school. About once or twice a month someone would come in with checks from these types of scams. The spectrum of who was falling for it was a lot wider than I would have ever imagined.

We were trained pretty extensively on stopping these checks from being deposited, but it sure broke my heart being the bearer of bad news so often.

I remember one guy who didn't believe me that it was a scam, asked that I at least try to clear the check (we'd put it on hold for about a week). Lo and behold, he came back in a week later to tell me it turned out to be fake.

Did you ever have the opposite, where you thought something was a scam check but it turned out to be legit?

Many times -- they made you pretty paranoid about fraud at training with horror stories of people who got fired for letting checks get through too loosely, so I was always proactive about it.

After about four years of it, you got really good at being able to analyze every deposit in under 30 seconds or so before the customer even knew what was going on.

God help us if the scammers ever find someone who can write correct English. I know many people get caught by these scams, and I suspect that the numbers would increase if the wording was improved a bit.

There's a metaphor about conversions and copy-writing and startups in there somewhere.

They have already. I regularly get properly phrased phishing emails from "PayPal". A few times I even got some from the banks that I use. I'm not sure if it was a coincidence or not, but the only thing that gave it away was the phishy URL.

Those are different. Phishes strive for perfection, because they win as soon as you log in to the fake site.

These "long con" 419 scams need to rebuff intelligent/savvy people and only attract rubes.

The poor spelling probably increases the conversion rate from people who make the first reply. The nigerian prince and poor-spelling spammers are dead giveaways to a spam. If you filter out people who know about these cliches, you increase the likelihood that the responder will give you money.

Could you imagine how many emails that they would have to field if they were, at a first pass, a convincing forgery? It's almost certainly used as a low pass filter to only prey on the ones likely to fall for it in the long run.

I've heard that for many scams it's actually the opposite: They intentionally throw in huge warning flags so that the people who initially "bite" are less likely to have second thoughts later on, and thus the scammer wastes less time chasing false leads. They're basically prequalifying you as a good mark. (There is a good lesson about marketing here too — theoretically "perfect" copy or design may not be ideal for your market, so test and see what provides the best ROI.)

here's a source that says something similar: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/428151/why_nigerian_...

I read a theory (probably on this site) that using obviously terrible scams helps them select for the most gullible people - e.g. the kind who would wire $500 of their own money back to Nigeria when the laptop arrived and "didn't work", plus a few hundred to cover expenses.

The problem for the scammers is the response rate is too high. The scammer has to invest time into writing back to the target, so they don't want to spend all day writing letters back.

By peppering the letters with bad spelling, punctuation and case mistakes, they eliminate 99.5% of the population who correctly detect it as a scam. Thus, when they do get a response, the person is much more likely to convert.

It applies to startups if signing up the customer requires cost on the part of the startup. If, for whatever reason, you had to sign up a limited number of people and invest time in each of those people, then reducing your response rate by, say, making the signup process complicated, would allow you to pre-qualify your audience by those actually able to navigate their way through it.

It would have real applicability if you wanted to get a limited market for beta testing.

+1. Plenty of people in the US have a subpar grasp of English (and yet are not retarded). For example, my dad was not born in the US, but has a Masters in Electrical Engineering and used to work on power grid systems. He's a smart guy. However, it took him a good amount of time to recognize phishing e-mails, some of it requiring my guidance. For example, it's not easy to identify Misused Capitalizations, or to pick up on missed article in email, or to recognizing verbs not agreed with time.

Furthermore, it is completely plausible to an inexperienced person that PayPal might enlist FBI to enforce shipment of paid-for goods. It takes some experience in this country to realize that 1) this sort of matter is not referred to FBI unless it's super grave, 2) and not referred to any enforcement entity so fast (less than 30 days), 3) and not referred to any separate enforcement entity without at least several resolution attempts from the original business.

In fact, IMO, it's quite arrogant, on the part of the OP to say this. Unfortunately, this is a typical attitude in the geekdom: if something that's obvious to us isn't obvious to you, you're stupid.

I'd still think paying $100 more than the asking price (with no explanation as to why) would be a strong clue something is amiss in this case.

But you're probably right that the use of English and the FBI enforcement letter are obvious only to a subset of people who grew up in a Western, Anglophone culture.

I only skimmed the article; I'd assumed that was part of the scam (forward the extra $100 on via western union, or paypal it back to me on this different account, etc)

Isn't that graue's point though, that it looks like it would be part of the scam and thus should throw alarms?

The extra money is usually not a scam in itself if they are trying to actually get you to ship the item. Once upon a time scams were all about moving cash, but I surmise those have gotten harder, so now they secure your item and (presumably) resell it.

Thus, the promised extra money is actually just a way to both ensure you'll "sell" to them as they made the highest bid, and also perhaps an attempt at triggering just a touch greed which does wonders for putting the blinders on.

I concur. My parents were recently duped by botspam sent from an estranged aunt's hacked aol account. The message was one sentence, two words of which were CLICK HERE. My mother spent a whole day researching the reality content farm it linked to, thinking something was happening to some family real-estate.

Maybe there needs to be some sort of Internet-wide PSA about this kind of thing?

My nephew got stung in a Paypal + eBay scam a few years ago. Long story short, they lured him in with a few bonafide transactions, then took big by "selling" a fake antique on eBay but making it look like he was the seller.

I provide technical support for Americans from the UK. +1 for understanding some of my audience.

> I could easily see my parents falling for this.

Sometime in the mid '90s, not long after my dad got email, I decided to warn him about Nigerian scams.

Instead, he ended up telling me about how these these kind of scams started popping out of the first fax machine he turned on, back in the early '80s.

Saw a new type of phishing email the other day - a fake order confirmation page from Amazon saying someone in Florida had ordered a widescreen TV on our account.

Obviously, first reaction of a non-techy user would be to click on the Amazon link in the email and enter their account details to check their order history.

And that's how they get your Amazon account details. I think this works because the "OMG my account has been hacked!!!" panic overrides you're natural caution about phishing emails.

I hate this sentiment so much. No one "deserves to have their money taken from them". Victim blaming 101. One of the reasons we have to waste so much effort fighting this kind of crap is this moronic idea that if you get scammed you deserve it.

To further add to this: there are quite a few gangs here in euroland who are successfully scamming older citizens with nothing but randomly calling them up, pretending to be a grandchild in trouble and in desperate need of some money and then that "grandkid" sends over a friend to collect the money. They are taking literally thousands from the elderly that way, you keep reading about it in the papers.

So I can see how these emails seem totally real and threatening to the average computer-illiterate who sells something for the first time ever. Remember, good scams are about that initial shock, that initial mental blow you deal on your victim to completely catch them off-guard and disable their logical thinking. Flashing a shiny batch or pretending it is an "emergency" is a very good angle.

There's a con scene in a movie, Nine Queens[0], in which a grandkid sends a friend to con his aunt. The movie is quite awesome btw..

[0]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247586/

Don't the scammers often use the victimized sellers as drop shippers?

Say, Alice lists a laptop on eBay or Craigslist. The scammer has also listed a similar model for sale, and Bob has purchased it in what he believes to be a legitimate transaction.

Scammer "buys" it from Alice, with either fraudulent funds from a stolen card (that would get charged back eventually) or just delivering a forged paypal mail. Or the famous "P-p-p-p-p-owerbook"[1] scam involved a fake escrow service. The scammer has Alice ship the laptop to Bob.

Alice is out a laptop, Bob gets a laptop, scammer gets Bob's money.

[1] http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=101...

OOC, what is the legal remedy in such a situation for Alice and Bob? Is Alice ultimately the one who loses out there presumably?

If Alice can prove it's her laptop, Bob has to give it back.

This might be dependent on the country in which the transaction takes place. Under some circumstances, if Bob believes that the laptop is now his, it actually is his property in some legislations.

Correct.

For instance in the Netherlands if you believe the person selling you the item has the right to sell it to you // perform that transaction, its yours. (The so called 'Vertrouwensbeginsel')

The only way for Alice to get her money back would be by going after the scammer, because he did not do his part of his deal with her(paying).

It should be noted that the belief should fall within reason.

So if something about the transaction is completely and obviously fishy, i.e. 'you should have known something was wrong'. Then its impossible to invoke the 'vertrouwensbeginsel'.

Excuse me, before we get all excited, where did Rebecca say that she is from Nigeria? Or are all internet scams now called 'Nigerian scams'?

The number of times Nigeria was used in that post, you would think the Nigerian flag and Rebecca's Nigerian passport accompanied the emails.

The shipping address?

Well, it was never mentioned.

In addition, because there are a lot of scams that seem to originate from Nigeria (not all that say they're Nigerian are), the author wonders why people should not be suspicious of ALL Nigerians like they are of fake FBI notices.

Interestingly, that paragraph is the most hilighted of this thread and no one thinks that type of blatant sterotyping and discrimination is odd.

As a Nigerian, it makes me really sad and uncomfortable.

This suggests it was the address:

"On the customs form, I put the value at $500 and the description said “cardboard art.” I’m not completely sure of this, but I think Nigerians have to pay a small percentage of the value to customs, so putting a high price on the customs form hopefully cost them a little money."

That bit about the customs fee wouldn't make sense otherwise.

That still doesn't mean it was sent to Nigeria. It just confirms that, for whatever reason, the author assumed the recipient was in Nigeria. The recipient may have very well been in Nigeria but he offers no definitive evidence.

I don't believe the author meant that people should be suspicious of "Nigerians" in general, but rather that they should be suspicious of Nigerians when in the context of an online monetary transaction.

The sad truth is that a lot of scammers originate from Nigeria. Therefore, it makes sense to be extra cautious when engaging in financial transactions with someone who is in within Nigeria.

I highly doubt the author was implying any sort of racist sentiment.

There are definitely scams that certain ethnic groups are involved in (Indian tailor scams? Chinese tea/art scams?), but this has more to do with skill diffusion more than ethnicity; people willing to scam learn it from someone close to them, and it seems 419 scams have achieved critical mass in Nigeria so the diffusion is pretty broad now (couple with an economic situation that makes scamming somewhat desirable).

I've met plenty of Nigerians who are not scammers. Stereotypes melt away quickly when you meet real people, but the survival filters remain in place.

Maybe the address he shipped to was in Nigeria? He never states that though.

I wasn't sure if this was just my impression, or if the blog author has some rather strong feelings against Nigerians, but his follow up comment ( http://www.notla.com/archives/2010/07/nigerian-scammer-gets-... ) leaves little doubt.

It leaves no doubt as his comment is most concentrated irony, isn't it? ;-)

PS: Look out for "2 years later update: Jesus, people, I know this scammer was from Nigeria because I SENT THE PACKAGE TO NIGERIA. Quit accusing me of being racist and hating all Nigerians and teaching my kids to stereotype."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_scam

One of the most common early internet scams was about money from a deposed Nigerian prince, and a fairly large percentage of these scammers are in Nigeria (as well as the US, UK, Netherlands, and Spain.) The name "Nigerian scam" became a generic term to refer to this type of scam, particularly in pop culture.

Very first paragraph of the Wikipedia page: "Nigerian scams (also called Nigerian 419 scams), are a type of advance fee fraud and one of the most common types of confidence frauds in which the victim is defrauded for monetary gain.".

The scam the blog author describes is not of this type. Nigerian scam refers specifically to the type of scam where people want your help "transfering large sums of money out of their country".

The particular incident that triggered the first use of the word "Nigeria" on the page in question was being fake-sent $500 instead of $400. This is a sign of a common variant of the scam, where extra fake-money is sent, and then the fake-buyer asks for a partial refund (see the Variants section of the Wikipedia page, particularly the first paragraph under "Online sales and rentals".)

The scam eventually took a different direction, but in the early going it definitely fit the stereotype.

So, to fully answer the question from the earlier poster: "Nigerian Scam" is a generic term referring to a broad category of scams. This particular scam looked like one of the common variants in its early stages.

EDIT: to even more fully answer that question, it's not fair that Nigerians have been stereotyped with the label "scammer" because of this sort of scam. I'd prefer a more neutral term, but I don't know of a good one.

The problem is that most of Nigerians that Americans know (through Internet) - are scammers.

Even though most of Nigerians are not scamers.

It may be interesting to note that merely the term "419 scam" implies Nigeria as well, since the 419 is referencing a specific section in the Nigerian Criminal Code.

I agree, it's wrong for the poster to call it a "Nigerian scam". It doesn't fit the definition of a 419 scam, and it just seems unnecessary as well as likely to encourage people in racism and stereotyping.

REBECCA DID NOT SAY SHE WAS FROM NIGERIA.

HOWEVER, MY LATE FATHER GOD BLESS HIM AZIZ ABDOULAYE WAS FINANCE MINISTER OF NIGERIA CRUELLY ASSASINATED BY THE CORRUPT OIL COMPANY AND HAS LEFT ME AND MY WIDOW MOTHER $75 MILLION AMERICA US DOLLAR IN HIS FORTUNE IN LONDON BANK ACCOUNT.

KNOWING YOU ARE AN HONEST BUSINESS MAN OF AMERICA AND GOT YOUR NAME FROM A TRUSTED ASSOCIATE GOD BLESS HIM I WISH YOU TO BE MY AGENT BUSINESS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. FOR THIS YOU SHALL HAVE FEE OF TEN PERCENT OF THE MONEYS SECURED FOR ME BY MY LATE FATHER

...

Hello good Sir,

I see that you know that I am an honest man of business and would kindly like to offer my services in transferring the aforementioned funds on your behalf for a mere ten percent. I have attached my passport and other details for your convenience and look forward to your response.

Yours,

Shiv R Metimbers

After seeing the stickers I was hoping the OP actually sent the computer with an undercover style backdoor installed so he could remotely control the computer, e.g. take shots with webcam, screenshots, install key logger, etc. That would have been incredibly amusing.

This is what I was expecting as well. It would be an interesting study into what happens when you 'fall' for one of these scams, although most likely this laptop was sent to a legitimate buyer as part of a larger scam, detailed by ben1040 here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566587

Im in! would someone please create a kickstarter project like that?

Goal: $400 for mediocre laptop and shipping cost to Nigeria.

$1: you get a photoshots in 5 sec intervals from the moment laptop comes online.

$10: you get a life video-feed from the moment the laptop comes online.

I wouldn't bother with the kickstarter project. $400+shipping is relatively cheap, and the exposure/blog material/research potential is worth that cost, for the right person.

(There is of course, the risk that the recipients are wise enough to isolate and wipe it before it has a chance to phone home.)

That's what I thought when I read the title.

I strongly doubt you would have gotten screenshots from the scammer but from another hapless victim who bought the laptop in a seemingly legit way. (fence) The very fact the scammer are already fine sending emails means they really don't need another laptop, they just want money. I can imagine in a lot of cases the laptop doesn't even get into the scammer's hands.

Very (probably unintentionally) similar to: http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/

That was my first thought as soon as I read a few sentences. It is almost identical.

I was wondering if the author has never heard of the P-P-P-Powerbook, or purposefully avoided citing it as a reference (e.g. the idea to deliver a fake laptop and the customs fee).

That was a great read, but the end is a tad scary! "Finally, and most disturbingly, [the victim] Jeff was not heard from again." http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/index04.html

I found that disturbing too, so I looked up Jeff. His twitter account is active with recent tweets: http://twitter.com/MyNameIsJeff

Probably doing fine!

This can go badly of course, taunting crooks is never the safe policy no matter how tempting it can be. The thing is, they are crooks, so they have already decided that they are willing to break the rules, what you don't know is how many they are willing to break.

>they are willing to break the rules, what you don't know is how many they are willing to break //

Isn't this true of almost everyone in society - whether it's jaywalking, or [minor] speeding, or not declaring income, or under-age drinking, or taking a sick day, or 'borrowing' a ream of paper from the office, or ...

My point I guess is that scamming people online doesn't seem to be a gateway to violent crime or anything like that??

Well, I suppose you could argue that the extra risk is the knowledge they have gathered as part of being a scammer. Knowledge being power and all that. A jaywalker doesn't know your phone number, where you live, and where your wife works.

Hopefully the scammer doesn't either, but hopefully this still conveys the point.

Edit: There's a difference too; jaywalking et al do not implicitly harm other people. I don't know all the legal intricacies, but theft (scams) is different.

Yup. And besides, it's an easy buck from some chumps, not a 1000$/day job you can get by buying my book and following my internet unlock steps!

Your Parent is insane to think that simply breaking rules means people have no ethics or morals themselves. Everyone is a dynamic person, and IMO someone who screws people within the confines of the law can be just as bad if not worse.

You listed a series of victimless crimes to prove that two crimes that do have victims are unrelated?

Living your life in fear of what people (crooks or not) may do is a sad existence.

Everything could go badly, it's waste of life to worry about the insignificant / unlikely things.

You missed a word there, it was 'taunting'.

It has nothing to do with fear per se, it has to do with risk. When you taunt some one, or some thing, you invoke an anger response in them. The thing is, you don't know what they are capable of when they are angry. So that is the risk.

I've reported dozens of Nigerian scammers in my day. Yahoo [1] used to have an email address for reporting them if they were using a Yahoo email account. I've also replied to them with a carbon copy to the FBI 419 abuse email address. I am even polite about it. It doesn't escalate the emotion.

Most scammers simply ignore you once you've reported them, occasionally they will swear at you and then ignore you. But it ends there.

[1] http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index;_ylt=AgcN27QhFLqwMA_Cfh52Fxl5...

[2] http://www.fbi.gov/scams-safety/fraud

Actually, wasting the scammers' time (at a minimal cost to you) is actually one of the better ways to combat this scam.

The entire scheme is based on the scammers avoiding baiting people who will catch on to the scheme (hence the obvious signs of scammage -- they're a reverse intelligence task), while snaring people who are likely to fall prey.

http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/study--obvious-nigeri...

This reduces their time cost, which is fairly high, as each mark must be navigated through the scam.

The ideal solution would be to create an AI which is sufficiently good to imitate a stupid, scammable individual, tarbaiting the scammers into wasting their time.

I deal with telemarketers the same way. I try to keep them on the line as long as possible, to ruin the caller's stats. (They always hang up first.)

If you haven't already, you should pick up Tom Mabe's CD, where he does some serious improv comedy with the telemarketers.

It is said that the p-p-p-powerbook guy disappeared some time after, but I could never verify it.

Overall though, I think the danger is pretty low, assuming you do not reveal your identity at any point.

Sadly perhaps but I know people that if I give them an email address they can turn that into an actual person + personal details. Not cheaply but they are scarily good at it. One of the side effects of no privacy / tracking etc etc is this.

He's at @mynameisjeff... looks pretty safe and alive to me.

More records of people baiting Nigerian scammers: http://419eater.com/html/letters.htm. People on http://www.419eater.com/ lead these “4-1-9” scammers on wild goose chases deliberately to waste their time, in the hopes of distracting them from attacking other people and also just having fun.

The one where the guy got the scammer carve a C64 out of a block of wood is my favorite. It turned out pretty good.

For those wondering it's this: http://419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm

Another good one was getting a scammer to hand write the entire first book of the Harry Potter series.

Not to defend or in any way condone the actions of the scammers (which I certainly don't), but I wonder how many of the counter-scammers do so out of high-mindedness, and how many are just looking for a chance to humiliate a relatively easy target - particularly after seeing some of the photos in the 'Trophy Room'.

I also wonder how many of those initiating the scams are actually the vicious, heartless criminals that the site insists they are - for example, one of the exchanges [1] results in the scammer sending about 9 hours of (ostensibly) himself reading Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy on the promise of earning some money for it. Career criminal, or having trouble finding work? Of course, some are genuinely dangerous people but it seems to me that there is probably a spectrum.

As I said, I'm not trying to defend those who seek to profit at the expense of others, but the level of grandstanding present on that site leaves me thinking that some of the counter-scammers themselves are doing exactly that.

[1] www.419eater.com/html/booked.htm

I don't think 419 scammers are necessarily evil people, but if you make your living stealing from people, then I say fair play for people trying to humiliate you for a laugh.

Who cares why they do it? And who cares why the 419 scammers do it? The point is, scamming makes the world a worse place and it's done because it makes money. Anything that can be done to ensure that it never makes money makes it more likely to go away. Yes, there's a chance people just looking for work are the ones who's time is wasted. Bad luck, but they chose that job. Yes, it's possible that the counter-scammers enjoy their hobby a bit to much. At least they use their possible character flaws to better mankind, ever so slightly.

> Not to defend or in any way condone the actions of the scammers (which I certainly don't), but I wonder how many of the counter-scammers do so out of high-mindedness, and how many are just looking for a chance to humiliate a relatively easy target - particularly after seeing some of the photos in the 'Trophy Room'.

I honestly had the same thought: is it right to make fun of people who are clearly poor, less fortunate and were born into that?

Then again, read some of those interviews with nigeria scammers and others and see for yourself what they are saying about "dumb", "greedy" Westerners and how high and mighty they feel about being able to do what they are doing. That really put it into perspective for me and then it is not making unfair fun of unfortunate people but making fun of shady, slimy assholes and trying to rid the world of some evil - and that is a good thing.

Hilarious. But it sucks that the author draws this conclusion:

"If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, [...], or just Nigerians in general, then they deserve to have their money taken from them."

I feel like we need a tumblr to post blatantly obvious scams like these. Maybe that would help the common folk be better at identifying them.

Someone actually did a paper on why every one of these scams seems to come from Nigeria[1]. If you're not at least suspicious when something like this comes "from Nigeria" at this point, there's probably no helping you.

[1]http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/WhyFromNigeria.pdf

Thanks for linking that paper, fascinating, the thought had never occurred to me.

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4136016

I was somewhat hoping that the writer sent a real laptop, but deeply loaded with spyware so he could learn more about the scam operations. (Of course, such a tactic might just learn about a possibly-innocent later repurchaser.)

I can't help but feel that whilst there is a chance that this is a Nigerian scammer, he shouldn't instantly presume it is. He also directly warns to be wary of Nigerians, without providing any reasoning that this IS a Nigerian. Even if it was, it's not really very important to the story.

While we're talking about scams, here's an interesting form which has cost several people their jobs and lost a lot of money for some UK schools.

(http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public-sector/3400081/ba...)

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n2t2f)

If you like that, have a look at http://www.419eater.com/ where there's a large community of people doing all sorts of scammer pranks. Obligatory warning: will decrease productivity for the rest of the day :-)

"If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of...Nigerians in general"

HN is a placed for reasoned argument, not stereotypes. Not <all> Nigerians are scammers.

Let me know how trusting everyone until you get scammed goes for you.

Well, it's a good thing no one said that then.

It was a great read and a nice way to give it back. Btw, after the last few chat messages I get a creaky feeling that Rebecca is a dude!

Yeah, "suck my divck" was a dead giveaway. Not something that a female is likely to say.

While I enjoyed your story, it's quite ignorant to ask people to be wary of "Nigerians in general". NOT every Nigerian is a scammer so making such a statement is unnecessary. There are many hard working Nigerians around the world.

This is one of the reasons that I built bidkat.com. With BidKat, scammers have to go through the trouble of making a valid offer (which can't be done with a screen scraper), verifying their offer, and then hoping that the seller contacts them before they can even start these conversations.

If the seller does happen to contact them, the conversation ends quickly once they aren't interested in paying since most sellers will have multiple offers to fall back on. While it doesn't solve the problem, we find that it raises the bar sufficiently to the point it currently isn't worth it for the scammers to bother.

Ahh.. It all makes sense now. After recently trying to sell my car on craigslist I received at least 20 emails of the same nature: vague, never a specific label of what they actually wanted to inquire of mine, and very interestingly using ASAP. Almost every one used that term... hm. Anyways I knew by the broken english and vague response it was a scam but never knew how they intended on pulling it off. They would ask for a paypal account to send funds too immediately without even seeing the car. I never did give them my paypal account as I didn't intend on wasting my time of getting faulty payments etc. But before I permanently deleted these contacts, I wanted to see if I could actually talk to one. I gave them all my number (it was in the add anyway) and told them before I can release my paypal info they have to call me.

The responses were priceless! 7-10 of them were in the navy deployed at sea and didn't have a phone (none of them knew each other surprisingly) a few were government officials who worked in such high level jobs that they couldn't be caught on the phone(but can buy cars on craigslist interestingly enough) and the last one claimed to be deaf.(and get this didn't know how to text!) Moral: Ask to speak with anyone who buys items off of you locally.

Nice job there. It is easy to forget though that we're all pretty tech savvy here on hacker news. There's a ton of people out there that would see that government logo and get all panicked and confused.

Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers (he's a butcher) fell for a Nigerian scam. Thankfully he was only out a couple of hundred bucks, but damn, we need a way to stop it.

> Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers (he's a butcher) fell for a Nigerian scam.

Please don't insult butchers. Not falling for a Nigerian scam has nothing to do with "[being] good at computers". It requires nothing more than the level-headed application of logic and reason.

I think you're reading the quote wrong. It could just as easily have been written thusly:

> Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers (he doesn't work with or in tech) fell for a Nigerian scam.

Still don't think it has anything to do with working in tech, it's common sense.

Being tech-savvy is only a small part of it.

Anybody who knows how the US legal system works should understand that there's no way they'd be getting a letter from the FBI encouraging them on behalf of a buyer to ship a product.

And anybody with an elementary school grasp of the English language has got to recognize that whoever wrote that letter is certainly not an FBI official, and probably not even a native English speaker.

I really wish someone would install some of the dye packs used to prevent theft in stores/banks in shipping boxes and mail those to scammers. it would be interesting to see if walking around with blue dye on their face would decrease their desire to scam others.

bonus points for a cheap cell phone camera that uploads a pic after the scanner is sprayed with the dye.

Reminds me of the P-p-p-powerbook prank!

http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/

Incidentally, those laptops are pretty good: I got one years ago when Dell was offering Ubuntu, and we still use it for my daughter. The battery is pretty much toast, but otherwise (fingers crossed) it's still going strong.

How different people treat the post privacy problem. So far (I hope) no pictures of my son have made it into the internet. Not even Facebook - although I suppose some web mail accounts are unavoidable.

Others post pictures of their kid playing pranks on gangsters on their blog.

I remember when I was a CSR at PayPal for the French market I used to think that there should have been some huge warehouses in Nigeria full of computers and phones.

Years later it seems it's still working splendidly.

Interestingly, __all__ of the Nigerian scammer e-mails I receive are written in British English.

Nigeria is a former British Colony and the official language is English, so that makes sense actually.

Fake laptop in exchange for a fake payment, sounds equitable.

This is super old...

you're thinking of po-po-po-powerbook.

You just made my day

Nigerian scammers are also just as dumb. A few years ago, I was easily able to phish them out of their accounts and other valuable information.

I made it into a game to see how far I could go. After I got into their accounts, I would change the password and shut their operation down (all through lots of proxies and other sorts of protections).

Most had large lists of stolen credit cards and pictures of licenses and passports.

Many of the people that actually freely gave away their info were lonely and desperate.

Trying to sell that ruined POS for $350 is the real punchline

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