[OT] Spambaiting

[dogscoff]

I get 20-30 spam mails per DAY in my webmail account, and I just couldn't resist it any longer. I decided to reply to one- I mean come on, I got 2 minutes to waste, if I can make them waste a few minutes of their time and a few seconds of bandwidth and show them up for the fckng idiots they are, I'm doing the world a favour. It's not like I could get any *more* spam to this address.

It was a South African variation on the Nigerian scam (you all know the details), and here's the reply I sent:

Wow!!, is this for real? ! HOw much money is that for me?!

Do you also know where I can get me some chepa viagra?

Please reply im not wasting youre time.

Youres sincerly,

Captain Elizabeth Spamtangle

Note the bad spelling, inappropriate punctuation and reference to cheap viagra. Hopefully they'll think I'm prime scambait. And if they are going to seriously reply to a message from "Captain Elizabeth Spamtangle" then I'm going to enjoy laughing heartily at their moronic arses.

I'll keep y'all posted...

[Kamog]

Hey, this is fun! I get tons of spam, too.

[dogscoff]

No nibbles yet.

[PvK]

Funny. Keeping free spambait accounts is an amusing idea to fight back.

Much spam seems to be just a dummy shot to detect whether there is anyone listening at an address. A lot of the spam "market" is in selling lists of supposedly real email addresses, so most of the spam is probably just research to see if anyone is there.

Their next step is to then dupe other obnoxious or clueless businessfolks into buying their lists, programs, or services to spam these lists of valid addresses.

The resulting spam traffic though often isn't actually trying to sell the target anything, and frequently the reply-to address is totally bogus and/or will hit some innocent sysop's In box. Some of the email is so offensive or incoherent that I expect that's a pretty good sign it's just a ping to see if an "unknown address" response comes back from the mail server or not.

PvK

[Ed Kolis]

I've occasionally been getting this message saying that I'm logged on to AIM at two different locations... so I decided to have some fun... Figuring that if someone else was logged in as me, they should be able to see any IM's I send, I typed something along these lines:

"You'd better stop hacking my account right now... I bet you didn't know that as long as you can see my private data, I can see yours just as well! "

I doubt anyone really hacked my account, but it would be fun just to see if I could fool some kiddie hacker like that!

[farstryder]

actually, the message tells you that it closed your connection at the other location, because you cannot be logged on in two places at once. so once your connection opens, the other one ends.

and, even if it were possible for two people to be logged into the same AIM account at once (which it isn't), they wouldn't be able to see what you had typed.

[Slynky]

Hmmm, I don't get spam. Only email I get is from friends and sites I have checked to receive newsletters from (Adobe, Jasc, etc.). And the ocassional (every month or two) virus email from someone who has a virus and doesn't know it.