Just when I thought the Internet had lost its appeal, I find a website that totally made me fall in love with the WWW all over again. The site in question is 419 Eater and it is dedicated to the ancient art of Scambaiting. The idea of scambaiting is simple: the next time you get one of those dodgy Nigerian emails promising you a share in millions, set up a fake email address and respond, stringing along your mark and generally disrupting their campaign of conning the hapless. There are some great stories on the site and some of them are so hilarious I was weeping, yes weeping, with laughter. There’s Derek Trotter’s Art Emporium who gets this stupid scammers to sent him artwork they’ve supposedly create in order to qualifiy for a fake arts grant – they end up spending their cash on expensive DHL shipping or Arse Bandits United where the scambaiter convinces the scammer that he’s looking to invest in Nigerian football or The Great Penis Caper where a lusty scammer tries to marry his mark for money – there’s a catch, he’ll have to supply pictures of his penis first.
Yes, it is greatly juvenile. Yes, it is a phenomenal waste of time. But it keeps the scammers busy. And while they are busy, they aren’t conning your Auntie Gladys out of her life’s savings in a bogus lottery scam. It is your public duty to join the crusade. It’s not particularly time-consuming – the idea being that you waste their time, not your own. Of course, scambaiting is an art and you should take great care with these criminals because lesser men have ended up robbed and dead with a bullet in their head on the dusty streets of Lagos. Even if you don’t get involved, I think you’ll agree that some of the stories are hilariously funny.
The baby mollies have almost tripled in size…

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