Responding to Craigslist Scammers

[Mike22Tor]

I posted this in someone else's thread and now can't seem to edit it or delete it. So I will post it here in the General Discussion and hope that is OK.

Recently, there seems to be an explosion in the number of Craigslist scams going on - mostly they are Nigerian-type scams involving shipping electronic goods overseas or obtaining victim's PayPol-type ID info and then faking emails from PayPol to the victim telling them that money has been deposited into their PayPol accounts. They also involve a number of web sites offering electronic goods (like TVs and Cell Phones) for prices that range between 25% to 35% of normal retail prices. These web sites also list a phone number with the intl area code of "0086" which is a code for China. These websites request the victims to enter a bunch of personal financial info in order to open an "account".

For several months I have been advocating engaging these scammers and trying to get them to send me 3 or 4 emails that are not of the "form letter" variety.

The reason is that I figured if other would do this as well, the amount of time the scammer would have to spend answering our emails would severly cut into the amount of time he could spend running his scam.

The numbers work in our favor because the scammer has to send out hundreds of emails before he finds a few victims who will actually fall for his scams. If only ten percent of those people would engage him and get him to write emails that would take perhaps 5 or 10 minutes of his time, then the amount of time he would have to spend would equate to almost a full day's worth of his time.

But I have abandoned that approach now for a far more effective and direct approach.

Considering that these people spam my email accounts, I have developed some tools that spam their email accounts and make it very difficult for them to conduct business.

Now this kind of spamming requires a very discerning approach. There are many factors involved. For example, it would be a waste of my time if itwas easy for the scammer to identify my emails and just delete them in a few seconds. So, they have to look like ordinary emails coming from his target victims. They have arrive at times and time intervals that would be appropriate. Finally they cannot be easily identified as spam emails. In other words, they can't all come from the same email ID or even the same email supplier - such as "free email dot com".

There are many other intricate requirements and I'd kind of like to help other people who would like to do the same sort of thing. But I'm unsure as to the best way to do that. I have written some software that sends massive amounts of email to these people and that would be one thing that I'd be willing to share.

Naturally, great care must be taken not to actually spam innocent people. At the very least, they could complain to our ISP's resulting in the cancellation of our Internet service.

But if they are actually inviting us to email them, then much of that problem is easily handled. And if it can be demonstrated that they are actual scammers attempting to cheat innocent victims out of their money, then it becomes very difficult for them to complain about getting spammed in return.

I'm not at all sure how to proceed. I've run my software only a few times and the results have been extremely enjoyable and effective. But I'd like to hear from some of you as to what your opinion of this method to strike back at the scammers.