Web Enthusiasts Poke Fun
At Online Scam Operators

WASHINGTON -- E-mails promising to share a Nigerian royal's fictional fortune are providing grist for a new hobby among Internet enthusiasts: scam baiting.

From Scamorama.com (www.scamorama.com¹) to quatloos.com (www.quatloos.com²), at least half a dozen Web sites are attracting dedicated fans to the online serialized comedies that result when scam artists are drawn into lengthy e-mail exchanges that poke fun at their get-rich-quick schemes, and, often, their grammar and spelling.

"It's a nice little hobby. It certainly beats stamp collecting," says Brad Christensen, a 52-year-old Phoenix man who in the past year has pretended to be an inventor, a bird watcher, and an eccentric nudist executive in his quest to waste the scam artists' money and time.

Mr. Christensen's letters, which appear on quatloos.com, a Web site devoted to exposing scams and frauds, include one that extracted a promise from his would-be scammer that any travel to Ghana would be rewarded with the chance to see live pterosaurs, even though they have been extinct since the Mesozoic era. In others, he pretends to be unable to operate a fax machine or dial an international call, forcing his targets to spend money calling and faxing him.

The target of scam-baiters like Mr. Christensen are so-called Nigerian advance-fee fraud schemes, which promise as much as 30% of a multimillion dollar windfall to the recipient in exchange for their help in transferring the money out of Nigeria. The scam artists usually pretend to be the wives of deposed rulers or civil servants seeking a business partner, and eventually they entice their victims to travel to Amsterdam or Africa to pick up their cash -- after they have demanded thousands of dollars upfront for phony taxes and transfer fees. The U.S. Secret Service estimates that the scam artists have managed to fleece victims out of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Willing Victims

Scam baiters turn the scheme around by pretending to be willing victims, then slowly drawing their quarry into a lengthy discourse on everything from plastic surgery to the proper protocol for a business meeting on a nude beach. Along the way, they extract various ridiculous promises from their pursuers, including photographs of them holding up written messages.

Although some scam baiters profess that they want to waste as much of a scam artist's time and money as possible, others say they simply want to be able to post an entertaining string of exchanges on their Web sites.

"I get a great deal of fun out of it," said Lee Kennedy, a 48-year old scientist in Melbourne, Australia, whose Web site (www.sweetchillisauce.com³) features a collection of correspondence. "I do it for myself and for the people who are reading it."

Mr. Kennedy, who spends about one to three hours a night corresponding with scam artists who think they're about to hook another victim, said he began posting his exchanges on the Web site in March 2002. Since then, he has posed as Sir Wilberforce Harrington-Smythe of Toffeynose Lane, who pesters a would-be scam artist for a recipe before dying mid-scam, and Kris Kringle, who puzzles over whether his elves can build the right type of computer disk out of recycled jam tins.

Scam-baiting has become the main attraction at a number of Web pages devoted to scams. Two friends in the Columbus, Ohio, area started the Scam Joke Page last year (www.geocities.com/scamjokepage⁴) and write under the pseudonym David Lee Roth, stringing along the scam artists who contact them and insulting them in the process. In one exchange, they suggest two fictional banks -- with the acronyms GRIFT and MORON -- that they'd like to use to send the scammer money. The scammer dutifully checks and responds that those banks don't have branches in his country, and that Western Union would be preferable.

Some of the scam-baiters use racially and sexually charged comments to get a reaction. More often than not, the insults are ignored or played down by the scam artists, at least until they realize that their intended victims aren't going to cough up some money.

"We try to be stupid and outrageous and see how fast they catch on," said Jason, a 30-year old Ohio man who shares the David Lee Roth moniker with a friend, Jeff. "I think these guys are willing to take anything because they think they're going to get a check in the mail."

Although the authors of scam-baiting series say they're in it for the amusement, their activity is seen as a positive by people who devote themselves to fighting spam and fraud. Mike Lewis, a Minneapolis-area software engineer who operates rantsinyourpants.com (www.rantsinyourpants.com⁵), says he believes the more people poke fun at the scams, the less effective the fraud becomes.

"If you're going to get all this spam, you might as well have some fun with it," said Mr. Lewis, whose spam contest tallies the money promised by Nigerian scam artists. "And if it gets some publicity, then maybe people wouldn't fall for as many scams."

Mr. Christensen, who sometimes poses as a wealthy inventor who created the Exac-Toe finger and toenail clipper ("works like a pencil sharpener!") and the BarfLog home-security device ("burns in the fireplace while one is away, producing an olfactory blanket of protection no thief would dare invade!"), said he gets a big kick out of agreeing to travel abroad to meet his pen pals, only to feign confusion about the meeting time or place at the last minute.

"It's very entertaining when they call after I don't show up. They're irritated, but they're trying to remain pleasant," he says.

Hazardous Hijinks?

Can such a hobby be dangerous? One American was killed in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1995 while pursuing an advance fee scam, and other foreign nationals have been reported missing. The Secret Service says violence and threats of physical harm may be used to pressure victims once they arrive in Nigeria to claim their supposed fortune.

But scam baiters say they aren't making the same mistakes as victims, and avoid coming into face-to-face contact with their quarry. The ones who like to give their scam targets a final slap in the face -- like Jason and Jeff of the David Lee Roth letters, who often send a final missive revealing their trick -- hide their identities by using fake e-mail accounts and refusing to provide real phone numbers or addresses.

Mr. Christensen is more sanguine; he uses his real name and real phone line at times. But he steers clear of antagonizing his targets in a final good-bye, and generally won't admit to scam artists that he's trying to trick them.

"I always leave them with the question in their minds: Is this guy for real or not?" he said.

Write to Lynn Cowan at lynn.cowan@dowjones.com⁶