British 419 scammers, you're gonna burn

[camwyn]

Fake bank website cons victims

West African criminals have used a fake version of a British bank's online service to milk victims of cash, say police.
The fake site was used to squeeze more money out of people they had already hooked.

The site has been shut down. But UK National Criminal Intelligence Service, (NCIS), said at least two Canadians had lost more than $100,000 after being taken in by the fake website.

The scam behind the fake web domain was the familiar one that offers people a share of the huge sums of money they need moved out of various African nations...

Here's the important bit: one of the relevant links in the margin.

National Criminal Intelligence Service West African Organised Crime Section

If you receive a 419 letter, hand the letter or email into your local police station, marked for the attention of the Fraud Squad. Emails should be printed out in full, including the header and complete sender details.

Please do not send them to NCIS, as intelligence on this crime is now collated on a regional basis before being forwarded to NCIS.

If you have lost money to this fraud, please immediately contact the West African Organised Crime Section direct on 020 7238 8012.

419 emails are very common, and you may continue to be sent them. Please do not send them direct to NCIS unless you have lost money. Instead, send a copy to the Internet Service Provider from where the 419 email originated. These emails should be addressed to:

abuse@ 'the ISP name' (for example abuse@yahoo.com, abuse@hotmail.com, abuse@onebox.com)

By this method, the ISPs can terminate any accounts that abuse their systems.

I'm sure they'll centralise at some point, but for now - have fun handing this in. These guys suck.

Comments

[mtr1966.livejournal.com]

I'm going to take an unpopular stance.

Yes, these guys suck. In most cases so do the victims.

I've received several dozen of these 419 emails over the years. (Somewhere someone seems to have put me on a sucker list. I don't know why. I don't give money to *ANYBODY* based on telephone, mail or Internet cold calls.) In all cases but one the email was inviting me to participate in an act which was both criminal and immoral. Usually it involved defrauding the Nigerian government of money.

Anybody who went along with that form of the scheme (in my experience the overwhelming majority form) walked into it thinking that they were going to defraud "The Man" of millions upon millions of dollars. The fact that they were themselves the victims of fraud in the end is a delicious kind of ironic and poetic justice. I have no sympathy.

(Yes, I am aware that this is not the only form of the 419 fraud. And that yes some people who really are innocent got nailed. The overwhelming majority of the victims, however, got nailed with the really unpleasant variant in which they wanted to be accomplices to fraud.)

The real victims of the 419 frauds are not the people who got nailed by it directly. The real victims of 419 are the Nigerian people because they are the ones whose economy suffers by the bad name that the 419ers are giving their country. Nobody with brains does business in Nigeria unless on terms that are very... negative. All payment up-front. No credit issued. No work done until the check has cleared the bank. Imagine if companies started doing that to your native country. Your economy would crash within a month. So I feel deep sympathy for the Nigerian people (those who are not 419ers themselves, of course).

[camwyn]

I'm not doing it out of pity for the people getting scammed; I'm doing it because I despise the scammers. Whether they suck in people who're genuinely innocent, or whether they suck in Kenneth Lay, the scammers themselves are people who ought to be smacked. On general principle. They encourage human stupidity and greed, albeit in the short term since over the long term the stupidity either runs out or the victim does. They're no better than viruses, no matter who they infect, and as such they make everyone around them miserable.

The Secret Service estimates that something like 8 out of 10 pieces of snail mail from Nigeria to the US through New York City are connected with fraud. You're quite right; the Nigerian people, and other West African people, are suffering indirectly worse than any of the scammers' immediate victims. But as I said, I'm not doing this because I feel sorry for the people who bit down on the scammers' lure; I'm doing this because I want to see someone who assumes other people are stupid get punished for encouraging them to be stupid. Indirectly, that benefits the people of Nigeria; directly, it makes me happy to think of some slob in a webcafe somewhere churning out his ugly little frauds and suddenly turning around to find himself under arrest. Die, spammer fraudulent scum.