Martin Lee, featured in a story in Monday's Daily Breeze, is not the only person to have led on a scammer. Others have tried to beat scammers at their own game, often with hilarious results.
- When an American eBay seller realized a European bidder was trying to scam him out of a Powerbook (a fake escrow site and hijacked eBay account were the tip-offs), he sent the scammer something far better: a P-P-P-Powerbook!
- Another "scambaiter" (someone who tries to humiliate and waste the time of rip-off artists) tells how he beats "Nigerian Letter" scammers with a story about having no time to help the scammers free their dead relatives' seized assets because he is so busy sending out $150,000 scholarships to talented carvers. He actually convinced one scammer to produce a detailed wooden replica of a Commodore 64 computer.
- A YouTube video shows two Nigerian men who were convinced by a scambaiter to reenact Monty Python's famous “Dead Parrot” sketch. The men sent a fraudulent e-mail to a scambaiter who told them he was in a position to give large cash grants to promising filmmakers, and advised them that the application process required applicants to submit their own Dead Parrot Sketch.
Fraudulent e-mail scams cost victims thousands of dollars every year, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. It's a serious, pervasive crime, and responding to the messages is very dangerous. If you receive such a message, it's smartest to just delete it right away — and leave the scambaiting to someone else.
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