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The Incredible Shrinking Artwork
If you've spent any time on the internet you have undoubtedly received spam mails from people professing to have huge sums of money they are willing to share with you if only you can help them get it out of their country. Perhaps a long lost relative of your has died, or perhaps an unscrupulous lawyer is trying to sneak the contents of a large unclaimed bank account out of the country.
These are all scams of course, and they have earned themselves the nickname of '419' after the section of the Nigerian penal code which addresses fraud schemes. They basically try to butter you up into giving out your personal details, bank account numbers or even sending them some form of processing fee to free up this huge amount of cash. Its a big business and thousands of such messages get sent out every day. Sadly, some people are taken in by them and end up losing a great deal of money. There have even been reports of people flying out to Nigeria (where most of these scams seem to originate from) and never being seen again....
There has sprung up a counter-movement to these scammers who respond to their mails in an attempt to waste as much of the scammers time as possible. There are a number of sites dedicated to this practice but the most popular is 419 Eater . They often post up the results of their email exchanges, revealing the lengths that scammers will go to if they think they're about to get sent some money.
One of the best examples of this Scam Baiting has been posted to the site. Ever thought you could get a scammer to carve a wooden Commodore 64 keyboard and post it to the UK...? Neither did I, but click below for details on how it was done.
The Incredible Shrinking Artwork