In what little spare time I have I engage in a “service” of
sorts. It started when I did some analysis of the spam I was
getting. I noticed several 419 scams (the get rich quick
schemes from nigeria) and from some poking around I arrived at a site
called 419eater.com. I became involved as a sort of hobby and
scam
bait a few hours a week now. The idea is that we can come up with
some great ways to divert the attentions of these scammers so they
don’t focus on real victims. Not really Batman style crime
fighting
but if you read the forum you will find some interesting stories
(including arrests).
How does this relate in any way to
AdSense? I’m getting there. One of the main tools used in
this fight is throw
away webmail accounts. Well I finally found a use for those 50
invites! I have created some persona and use these as trap
boxes to lure potential scammers. I glanced at the ads while
scanning a new scammer email and I saw the following:
Nigerian Scam
Article in PC Magazine Read it online. Free Trial!
Woman scammed out of $5,000 in Temecula
Temecula Press-Enterprise (subscription)-Mar 30, 2005
The victim was talked into giving the strangers money
to…
I can only hope that some poor victim gets a look at this and realizes
that not everything is above board.
This
topic came up in one of classes recently, not the scam baiting
but the ad sense. Many in the room were not comfortable with the
idea that a program was searching through the email and offering
relevent ads. None seemed concerned that other bots were
programatically looking at their email for virii or searching their
credit card activity for “inconsistent” spending. Personally the
last
one bothers me more then anything else. If I am truely concerned
about my email (especially webmail which we should all think of as non
private) then I can encrypt the messages.
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