He's living at the bus station, sleeping outside, still in the same clothes he arrived in. They had been told over email that they could get a pile of money, a scholarship grant, if they were any good.įor the next few weeks, the truth of Adamu's situation, as best as they can figure, is this. On YouTube, you can watch some West African email scammers perform on video an old Monty Python sketch about a dead parrot. They convince them to get funny tattoos or build pyramids out of sandbags or pose for embarrassing photos. They call themselves baiters, or scam baiters, because they bait the con men into doing all kinds of ridiculous things. But it also raised some interesting questions about whether these internet vigilantes, these self-appointed enforcers, go too far.Ĭhances are you may have heard of guys who do this. SCUM GAME SKIPPING DSYNC HOW TOThis is the website where internet vigilantes like themselves compare stories, and share victories, and swap trade secrets on how to get the email scammers.Īnd this spring and summer, these three guys ran an operation against the scammers that not only exceeded all expectations, they became kind of an internet sensation in their community, scoring more page views than anything comparable. That 4-1-9 in the name, yes, refers to the Nigerian criminal code. Three of these guys met on the discussion boards of a website called. So into this breach, onto this lawless frontier, where traditional police work has failed, has stepped the vigilantes. SCUM GAME SKIPPING DSYNC CODE4-1-9 is the part of the Nigerian criminal code that deals with fraud. Lots of them are actually in Nigeria, so many that one nickname for this kind of con is to call it a 4-1-9 scam. The thieves are hard to catch because, it turns out, they really are overseas in places that American law enforcement has a hard time reaching. Though, and here's the reason why I'm bringing all this up, it is rare for anybody to be arrested for this. And the real number may be more like a $100 million, according to the federal government's Internet Crime Complaint Center, which says that the average loss to each victim is about $2,000. In 2007, Americans reported losing $15 million to this particular email scam. They string you along for as long as they can. And so you pay that and then on and on it goes. They're sure if you just do this one more thing, you'll get your money. There will be some problem, some bank official who needs to be bribed or some new fee. And after you pay that, of course, they don't deliver the money. If you reply to those emails, after some back and forth, they'll let you know there's a processing fee that you're going to need to pay for the courier, or the insurance, or whatever. And somebody needs help getting that money out of the country.īut until recently when somebody explained it to me, I never really stopped to think about how this scam actually works. Like everybody else who has email, I've gotten those messages where they say that there is $8 million sitting in a bank in Nigeria and the money is just sitting there, doing nothing. Alex Blumberg has the story of an enforcer who refused to enforce even when pleaded with to do more to protect people from the financial turmoil that we see in the news every day. In that act, some freelance self-appointed enforcers who enjoy the hell out of enforcing frontier justice on the internet. And also, the people who are supposed to wear the sheriff's badge but sometimes have a hard time putting it on. Though, of course, the line between protecting your side and just being a bully can get kind of hazy.Īnd so, today on our show, Enforcers, people who take the law into their own hands. I think what's going on is that our politics are so rough and nobody is really refereeing that somebody's got to be the tough guy, not to bring justice exactly, but to protect their own side. Almost immediately she came out swinging, going straight for Democratic Senator Barack Obama's ribs and knee caps." A guy in The National Ledger wrote, "Barack Obama evidently believes he needs somebody to protect him like a hockey team star, so he chose Senator Joe Biden." A reporter for the Rocky Mountain News wrote, "She calls herself a hockey mom, but now Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is jumping into a job more akin to a hockey enforcer for Senator John McCain. At the two political conventions this summer, some commentators started comparing our nation's two vice presidential candidates to hockey enforcers.
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