Robert Siciliano and scambaiter Anthony DeSano explain how people turn the tables on email scammers by wasting their time with fake personas and sending them junk freight. The segment warns about risks while showing how scambaiters fight back against 419 cons.
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They prey on the innocent, wiping out bank accounts, leaving people in debt. They have probably even tried to get you.
Yeah, we're talking about email scammers. Fed up? Well, then you're going to want to watch this story. Fox 25's Ted Daniel with the creative ways some people are fighting back, scamming the scammers.
They clutter your inbox. One of my favorite ones is the prince from Nigeria, you know, asks you if you want to help them with a business and just need your bank account number to help start it. A fortune always awaits. We need somebody in a local bank to help us with these wire transfers and you'll get 10%. It's always poor English. Uh, and he's gonna send you, uh, you're the winner in some lottery or something. Circulating for more than a decade, believe it or not, the emails continue to hook people. Highly underreported, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received close to 50 confidence fraud complaints from Massachusetts residents last year.
You have these scammers that are sitting in internet cafes across the world and they're sending out millions and millions of emails every single minute of every single day. Chances are they gleaned your information from a source that you never thought your information could be compromised.
Most of us hit delete. We don't want to be bothered. But others take a different approach. They fight back. Meet Anthony DeSano, a computer repair shop owner in Providence and an email scammer's worst nightmare.
I'm trying to hook him right now.
Anthony is the founder of thescambaiter.com, and there are thousands like him. They turn the tables on the crooks and post their conquests online. Can you just pass a quick message on to Mr. Martins for me, please? Alright. Just tell him I know he's a 419 scammer and I'm not coming. Anthony and others like him actually reply to the emails and pretend to be unsuspecting victims.
Today I think I'll be female. I'll be Stacy.
And then after weeks, sometimes months of correspondence, they trick the scammers into doing outrageous things. From sending goofy videos to bizarre and often compromising photos of themselves. If they think it will lead to a payday, Anthony says the internet scammers will do just about anything.
You just have to be very realistic on the phone. Don't push the bait when you're talking to the scammer so there's no alarm sent. So if you're one step ahead of them, they'll always stay one step behind.
One of Anthony's favorites is to tell a scammer he has no money but can send costly computer equipment in exchange for the funds they have requested. Anthony will actually load boxes of junk and have the scammer pay the shipping charge. One time, Anthony even sent a broken stove and a washing machine all the way to Nigeria.
I've got one guy 9 times in a row. He spent $65,000 in freight charges.
So does Anthony ever feel bad for the scammers? No. He says the more time they're dealing with him, the less time they have to target real victims.
I think scambaiters are actually doing us a pretty good service.
Computer security expert Robert Siciliano says although effective, he doesn't recommend this for everyone.
The scambaiter is putting themselves out there. They are putting themselves at a certain amount of risk because when they do this, they're involving themselves in a criminal's grasp. They could be bringing on some conflict in their own lives.
I am very interested in this. Transaction.
Anthony says he never uses his real identity when scambaiting, and so far has gotten nothing but laughs. We are anti-scammer. He says as long as the email scammers are out there, there will be scambaiters fighting back. We're helping to fight crime. I'm Ted Daniel, FOX 25 News.
Well, if you feel like you've been a victim of an email scam, there is a place you can actually file a complaint. The Internet Crime Complaint Complaint Center is a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center.
For a link to the complaint forms and more tips on how you can avoid being scammed, log on to our website, myfoxboston.com.
