Now and then, I get one of those “You just won an African lottery you never entered that doesn’t exist return mail to claim prize money”-type email scams. Thanks to TruthorFiction.com and other “blow the urban myth” type sites, I already know the ninety zillion lame schemes used to try to rob me through my computer. My question is, just for the fun of it, how many replies could I shoot back and forth with these folks, toying with them like the Sadistic freak that I am, in complete safety, presuming of course that I never revealed a single factual clue about myself and assuming that I’m a virus-smart user who’d never dream of opening an attatched file, etc.? And what ideas could I use? Could I get them to dial 911 and ask for Mr. A. Restmeplease? Could I get them to drive to the middle of <insert your most dangerous, gang-ridden ghetto here> at 2 am to “meet me”? Could I get them to run out in traffic naked? And isn’t it a nice thought, anyhow?
You’re not the only one who has thought about this. I nearly set up a foreign email address just for giggles to reply to one. The best website I’ve seen with examples of pranksters writing back to the scammers is Scam-O-Rama. This site includes some real howlers. Here are some of the things the people featured on that site have actually done:
- Convinced a scammer to send him a picture holding a letterhead of the company the “victim” supposedly worked for. This company was named IMAD ILDO LTD.
- Claimed to be a famous celebrity, such as Mr. T - and had the scammer believe him.
- Claimed to be a famous fictional or dead character, and gotten away with it. Examples include Darth Vader, Oliver Cromwell, and Don Quixote (that one is featured on another site). The guy who attempted to impersonate Harry Potter was found out though.
- One or two actually managed to persuade scammers to send them a few dollars
- Convinced scammers to book expensive hotels for their arrival - which of course never happened.
- Pretended to be a character so absurd as to border on the unthinkable. My favorite is the guy who insisted he was a disembodied head in a basement at Miskatonic University.
- Fooled a spammer into repeatedly calling the police office in Tiajuanna and saying “I have no testicles” in Spanish.
And the rest of them found plenty of other ways to be absurd or merely annoy the heck out of the scammers. So, don’t give any correct personal information (I would not talk on the phone with one), remember that you should not give them anything or meet with them, and have fun. You are dealing with large crime syndicates, so you will want to be careful, but realistically, they are not likely to try to get revenge internationally. Especially if they have bogus information about what continent you are on. Actually meeting them can be another story!
I believe a Doper actually corresponded with one of these scammers for a while and post the email exchange here. I do not recall how far it ran before it petered out, whether the scammers dropped it or the Doper felt it wasn’t worth his/her time.
Other things Scamorama folk have done include getting a scammer to send a sample of real gold (thereby effectively and financially scamming the scammer) and getting the scammer to open an email attachment containing a hard drive wiping virus.