Most email users are familiar with the 419 scams they get with their morning spam, typically variations on the advance fee fraud.
There is an unusual charitable organization dedicated to fighting these scammers by wasting their time. The tactic is called scambaiting.
It's not an organization in the sense of being an IRS non-profit, but it has evolved into a society that provides assistance and advice to it's members, has rules about recognition, awards, and a code of conduct.
The membership has used an incredible range of creative tactics to focus the attention of the scammers on themselves instead of on the gullible. Go read their forums for an hour or two and laugh at the delays that poor english and desperate scammers can lead to. Everything from responding to scams as a dead person who just needs the scammer to contact their estate lawyer in order to get their payment processed, to pretending to be a rival scamming gang that is impressed with their work, has stolen the scammer's customers, and wants to hire them to work full-time for a percentage of the take. Many times the scam baiters will convince the scammers to send photographs, or even film a Monty Python sketch!
You might think that the amount of time that scammers waste dealing with this group is trivial. In contrast, you may notice that there are awards for how far you can get a scammer to travel while trying to close a deal. Bonus points depending on how many national borders they cross in the process.
Why do they do it?
"It has been estimated that there are well over 250,000 scammers involved in 419 scams worldwide and that they reap in over US$1.5 billion annually. The average victim pays out US$20,000."
The members spend some time helping victims of the scammers directly, but they are also into prevention. The time and resources a scammer spends with an experienced baiter is time the scammer can't spend on creating a real victim. They also turn bank account and other scammer details over to the proper authorities in order to get them closed down.
Scambaiting is charitable activity to benefit some of the least able to protect themselves on the internet, the gullible and soft-hearted. It's not just financial scams. Some victims are lured in by the idea that they are going to be adopting needy children, or a million other excuses.
It's a fun game for the baiters that they can play in their spare time on the internet. Setup a free email account, publish your new email address so that you get plenty of spam, then adopt the persona of a someone who wants to know more. The rest falls into place quickly.
It's also a modern economic war of attrition, waged across the internet. Regular police agencies like the FBI or Interpol don't spend the time and resources that would be necessary to investigate all the reports of 419 scammers that come flooding in. When the scammers are sending millions of emails a day to try and lure in a victim, the police are unable to investigate them all.
Just like if a burgler shoots you in your home, by the time the police investigate, it's too late for the victims. In scammer cases it's even worse. All they can do is take a report and maybe see if a scammer ever visits the victim's country to be arrested.
That means the scammers have a key advantage over the police. They have the numbers and the inexpensive labor (as well as labor-saving computers) to overwhelm the current police response. There are more of them then there are of the police.
Hence the need for volunteer help. The volunteers aren't vigilantes. They don't go out and arrest scammers, and there is a strong ethic against doing anything illegal while baiting them.
What they do is become unpaid police informants in the one job that really can be done anonymously over the internet. They spend their free time and leverage it against the scammers in the same way the scammers are able to leverage their time against the police. That turns the economics of the situation back around, slowly making the cost of being a scammer higher and higher.
