I was getting up to a couple of dozen scam emails a day on one of my webmail accounts - pretty nearly all of them being automatically filtered into the junk folder, but I thought I’d try an experiment.
I dutifully replied to each and every incoming scam email - only ever writing “idiot scammer”, or “obvious scammer is obvious”, etc. I kept this up for about a month.
The volume of incoming scam-spam slowed down, and has now almost stopped - which is weird, because I don’t think I really expected it to. Is there any chance it actually stopped because of my replies?
You could be right. Time will tell - I guess it could just be that the mail host is implementing different filtering rules for some reason (that is, I imagine only borderline spam makes it as far as my junk folder - I should think some is discarded before I see it)
But did a number of your replies bounce back? I think about doing this but the originating address is almost always a fake account made up of random letters.
Maybe your e-mails went to actual persons who didn’t know their PC was infected and was sending out spam. Your e-mails alerted them to that fact and they got their wizz kid neighbour to finally run an anti malware program and set up a firewall.
And they were too embarrassed to reply to your email and say they fixed the problem.
Update: The frequency of scam emails hitting my account seems to have remained lower than before, but of course there’s no way to be sure of a causal link.
Just for fun, what I’m now doing is, when I send the ‘idiot scammer’ reply, I send it to a whole list, comprising all of the previous scammers. One of them tried to argue with me that his scheme wasn’t really a scam, and that there really was a suitcase full of money waiting for me to claim it (there was even a photo of the suitcase). He now occasionally sends a whiny complaint that I’m a bad person for keeping on sending him emails saying ‘Idiot scammer’, so in some small way, I feel like it’s been worth it anyway.
The latest one (today, first this week) made me laugh out loud:
I just put that in the body when I reply. They must be reading it, because they’re asking me to reply (i.e. if I’d fallen for their scam, I’d be replying)
There was an interesting SDMB thread hypothesizing that spelling and grammar errors in such scam-spam are not defects, but rather the result of positive natural selection!
Scammers do not want to waste time with anyone but the most gullible and foolish people. Thus grammar and logic errors which will dissuade others from responding are good for the scammer; the errors mean any responses will be from more promising customers. (It isn’t clear whether scammers make such errors deliberately.)
This is kind of like the snail-mail equivalent of attaching a brick to a postage pre-paid junk mail envelope! I love it. I’m glad it’s actually annoying one of them too. That’s great to hear!!!
Also, as I understand it (and from experience of baiting them), there’s almost a call-centre type organisation with some of these scammers - a bunch of drones just cranking out the initial spam and filtering the responses, then passing the more promising ones on to more experienced/expert scammers.
I can’t help wondering if there might be a way to combat scammers by swamping their inboxes with useless replies - a DoS attack, of sorts - where anyone receiving a scam email would feed it into a system that then organises a broad, distributed, large-scale set of replies.
There are problems with this idea though - it would probably violate the T&Cs of many email services - and it would itself be a target for abuse (i.e. there would be people who for various reasons would want to feed it the email addresses of people who are not scammers)
