An open letter to all Nigerian fraudsters
ecobank.customerservice.inbox.as
Gentlemen,
Welcome to your future.
"Chaos Project #1", a part of this website, describes the monitoring,
ensnarement, and takedown of a small group of your fellow countrymen who
attempted to lure victims to part with their money by means of a fake bank
website. That website, the associated bank email account, and more than fifty
other email accounts are now under our control. This unfortunate group of
hapless criminals had recently paid in advance for one year of email and web
hosting in this account; as a final humiliation, that funding will now provide a
home for The Chaos Project.
What, or who, is The Chaos Project? Is it a team of highly-trained law
enforcement technology specialists? Is it a 14-year-old schoolboy operating
from an Internet cafe on his way home from school? You will never know.
The only thing that will be revealed to you is this: what The Chaos Project has
achieved was not difficult. It required little more than some basic Internet
skills, a little cunning, a little time, and one final, crucial ingredient: your own
rank stupidity.
The Advance Fee or '419' frauds that you operate have been around now for
decades. Where you once made your approaches by means of handwritten
letters, your schemes evolved to utilise word processors, computers, and
eventually email and the Internet. Now you fax copies of official-looking
documents around the world, refer victims to fake bank websites, and email
them pictures or even movies of large boxes of cash.
That much is history. Now let us outline the future.
By bringing your activity to the Internet, you gained the ability to send your
fraudulent approach messages to hundreds, even thousands of people at a
time, within seconds. Like other spammers, you no longer needed to carefully
target your pitch; you could send it to huge lists of addresses, knowing that
even if only one or two took the bait, you had a chance of a return.
What you did not consider is this: because of your scatter-shot approach,
within a few short years a significant proportion of Internet users have now
seen at least one of your messages, and most of them have seen many. There
is a word for this, gentlemen: Education. By now, it is a rare event indeed for
one of your messages to arrive in the mailbox of a person who is not aware of
your real intentions.
What is increasingly common is for your messages to be delivered to someone
who knows what you hope to achieve, and is interested in thwarting,
frustrating, and humiliating you. Anti-scam sites are springing up all over the
Internet. They are amusing and interesting, and as such, they draw media
attention. Reports in the media spread the word of your activity even faster.
The Chaos Project knew of Nigerian fraud fifteen years ago, but only learnt
of 'scam-baiting' more recently, from just such a report. When a message
arrived from the group that became the target of Chaos Project #1, The
Chaos Project was not surprised, concerned, or annoyed; it was pleased. It
had been waiting.
With the publication of The Chaos Project's website, readers will learn that
making fun of Advance Fee Fraud criminals such as yourselves is no longer
the only option; they will learn that it is possible, even easy, to outwit and
frustrate you at every turn. Word will spread quickly.
If you are a fraudster reading this message, you will probably shrug and laugh.
You will not believe that The Chaos Project can ever harm you, and you are
probably correct. The Chaos Project is not large, or sophisticated. It will
conduct few operations, and its own efforts will never directly affect more
than a drop in the ocean of Nigerian fraud. But The Chaos Project will not
remain unique. It is a concept whose time has arrived. The same set of
circumstances and influences that created this project will create other, larger,
better projects. Think of this as simply a demonstration of what is to come.
When you next finish weeding out the massive list of bounces from your latest
spam, you will be left with a group of responses that will no longer be just a
collection of opportunities for you. Hidden amongst them will be an unknown
number of false identities. Perhaps they will just be stringing you along for
fun, taking you for a ride with the intention of nothing more than wasting your
time for as long as possible, before publicly humiliating you. Or perhaps they
will be looking for an entry into your own network of accounts. Perhaps they
will be after more than that.
One day, and that day may be very soon, one of them will get you arrested.
So what should you do? Consider this, my friends: the smarter ones amongst
you will soon see the writing on the wall. Time is running out, and because of
your own greed and stupidity the days of profitable 419 scams are now
numbered. It will not be long before even gainful employment is a better
option than sitting all day in an Internet cafe while moderately intelligent
foreigners harass and humiliate you. We know that finding a real job in your
country is not easy. But when you have to compete with thousands of your
fellow ex-criminals, it will only be that much harder.
So once again we say: Welcome to the future. Welcome to the world of
The Chaos Project |
