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The Skammerz Ishu

We Spent Months Scamming a Scammer into Doing Our Work for Us

Scam-baiting is a form of internet vigilantism in which the vigilante poses as a potential victim to expose a scammer. The cover of the issue you're looking at is a trophy from the most elaborate bait I've ever been involved in.

Scam-baiting is a form of internet vigilantism in which the vigilante poses as a potential victim to expose a scammer. It's essentially grassroots social engineering conducted as civic duty or even amusement, a cross-cultural double bluff in which participants on separate continents try to outdo each other in an online tug-of-war for one's time and resources—and the other's private banking information.

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The baiter begins by "biting the hook"—answering an email from the scammer. The "victim" feigns receptivity to the financial lure, engaging the scammer in a drawn-out chain of emails. The most important element of baiting is to waste as much of the scammer's time as possible—when a scammer is preoccupied, it prevents him from conning genuine victims.

The cover of the issue you're looking at is a trophy from the most elaborate bait I've ever been involved in. Three scammers, spread across Libya and the United Arab Emirates, set the con. They posed as a widow named Nourhan Abdul Aziz, a doctor named Dr. Ahmadiyya Ibrahim, and a banker going by Ephraim Adamoah. From Nourhan's initial contact with my associ- ate, Condo Rice, to Ephraim's actually donning an Obama mask and shooting our cover for us, 7,000 words were exchanged over nearly four months of emails. During that time, Condo and I negotiated our way through a labyrinthine net- work of fake websites, bogus documents, and broken English, and ended up with the weirdest photograph I've seen in a long time.