How did y'all come to Scambaiting?

[LilRachel]

Eater is a large community full of dedicated individuals whose goal is to make life as hard as possible for all those nasty scammers out there. Some of you have been around for years (and decades), others, like me, are just getting started. To be honest: I admire many of you!

But, what I'd really like to know is, what was your initial motivation when you started baiting? Was it because someone from your environment became a victim of scam; out of pure love for justice, out of boredom? Or for any other reason?

I for my part became aware of this forum (the old one) via YouTube a few years ago. At first I just read along but then I was so impressed by the high personal effort and the "love for detail" that many people put in here that I thought I should turn a passive hobby into an active one. Now, I try to improve myself bit by bit and am very happy about every new oinker I can add to my signature. Maybe one day there'll be other icons, we'll see...

How about you?

[Kitty La Gore]

For me, it started out 9 years ago when I was on dating sites. I kept getting the same basic profile type hitting on me, not reading my bio, and sending the same-ish message: "Construction work, $150K per year, widowed, 2 kids, Native American" and the message was "hey beautiful,,,am cool and love to get to know you better what is your phone number?"

I never once replied, but started filtering through the dating site (match) for guys with that profile type, and found they almost all had really handsome photos that (using tineye or google image search) belonged to someone other than who they said they were. I put in a good year or three reporting those accounts randomly - some of them I started recognizing by the photos before I even read the profiles! I didn't realize at the time they would simply create a new account, and I probably messed up a few baits (sorry).

I finally got curious, created a fake email address and made a fake dating account to see what they really wanted. Figured it out pretty quickly, googled some terms & found out about scambaiting by reading everything on Eater. At that point, I had mostly been reporting profiles from my fake account (ironic). But it was reading a bait by Ginger Lee that showed me what the entertainment potential was, so I started baiting for real (particularly since the dates weren't going very well at that point - what else to do on a Friday night?!) and the rest is history.

BTW one of the very first baits I ever did was my long-term lad "Tim"! We just "celebrated" our 6 year anniversary.

[sparky905]

On a junk email account I rec'd a consignment box email. I usually just deleted this crap, but figured why not play along just for fun? So I did, and started asking my "agent" for proof of the shipment, proof of who he was, and made up a story about myself. Without knowing it, I was baiting him, completely unaware that people did this. After several weeks and over 100 lad emails, I stumbled across Eater and found out that people do this stuff on purpose. So I joined. I t was not until after I joined though that I learned there was a higher purpose to all this lad pain, and that it was not just cheap entertainment. It was merely by chance that I was "baiting safe", but I quickly learned why we need to do that.......and I've been here ever since. That was 3 yrs ago in July.

[Starbuck]

My experience seems very similar to the OP. I think the first time I encountered scambaiting was when I stumbled across youtube video made by a former member of the site. That video pointed to the forum and there was so much material to read through. I fondly remember going through the greatest hits with my favourite entry being "Christmas at the Orphanage" by Mr Labowski

Finding the whole idea very amusing, I dabbled with a bit of baiting but it didn't last long. I came back a couple of years later and got back into it in a bigger way (had more time on my hands!), and have been doing some level of baiting ever since.

[McMarz]

I don't really know anymore how I found out about scambaiting, but somehow in 2014 I found Eater. I read one of the Shiver Metimbers baits from the Letters Archive and had so much fun with it, that I spent the next two days reading the rest of his baits.

At that moment the US Safari, Golden Pith: 8 safaris, 21K miles bait was only a few pages long and I started following it. It was like reading a thriller, where every two pages there was a new twist. Watching several baiters setting those two lads up against each other and making one of them travel all over the US was the best thing ever. I can remember sitting in the middle of the night on the couch, watching the webcam of a hotel and seeing a scammer, who was 1,500 miles away from home, standing on a square in Aspen like an idiot, was so extremely satisfying.

I didn't start baiting myself until the beginning of 2019 when I got a bit more spare time. Since then I've been mainly baiting for bank accounts and also annoying lads with my very stubborn priest character.

[Logar]

Way back in early 2006, I remember cleaning out my spam folder and finding that so many Nigerian Princes and Princesses wanted to help me with their money. I started doing a little research. I found a lot of sad stories about people (especially the elderly) losing their money to scammers. And then, I stumbled upon a happy go lucky group that were fighting back, led by the legendary Shiver. I read his book about baiting (does anyone remember the book?). I joined up and been mostly straight baiting ever since. Before technology got to the level it is, one of my favorite things was to see how many times I could get a lad to go to the Money Gram office. Or to see how many Chuckys (Prof Charles Soludo) I could bait at the same time and play off against each other. When gmail got rid of the complicated sign up rules, I have been able to add quite a few new members to my harem of baiter mails. The down side is that this has made it easier for the Lads, too. Now all these years later, there are still a few willing to take on this almighty task of facing down the Lads. When Lenny and Money Gram Safe Pay came out, new levels of Lad pain were felt (this is a huge shout-out to STS). To those who make the Safaris and Church Baits so enjoyable to read about - I salute you for your dedication.
Ok, I am getting the signal to wind up my speech.

[Padme]

I had always been interested in various types of scams. In early 2005 I decided to answer some scam emails as different Star Wars characters (thus my username) just to see how far I could take it and ended up having a three month long saga, which seemed like forever to me at the time, where my Anakin character was writing lonely letters complaining about the conditions during his various adventures to his lad love interest. That bait was posted on another site that's now long gone (I believe), from there I ended up finding eater and joined in May 2005.

[DerekTrotter1981]

Well, I suppose you could say that I got into it from watching a scambaiting series on YouTube and I thought "What if I did this, myself?" So, after a while of unsuccessful scams (which I mostly got from ScamWarners), I managed to get my own share of receiving mail from scammers by signing something called the muguguestbook (have any of you heard of it?)

I'm not giving away my real name for security reasons (I'm sure it's frowned upon anyway among this community since we wouldn't want scammers finding out who we are), so I'm going to refer to myself by my profile name: Derek Trotter (he is actually a fictional character, from Only Fools and Horses and is one of two scambaiting accounts I have, which is based on a character from the same program).

I think my scambaiting time has come quite recently, with shocking results; sometimes, conversations are short and sometimes they just don't reply at all. So I'm hoping I could get some advice and maybe even post my own experiences.

[Vision]

I think I first encountered scambaiting while watching a video from James Veitch on YouTube a few years ago and I wanted to make these things too but I didn't know where to start. Then last year I somehow came across the scambaiting scene on Reddit and from there I found my way to 419 Eater. Quite a journey when I think about it know and a bit random too

[DerekTrotter1981]

I came here, via somebody else who seemed to have such co-operative scammers.

[ZenosParadoxes]

For me, the interest began back when the Wooden Commodore 64 was featured on several websites and continued with the online livestreams and Veitch's TED Talks, but that Commodore 64 was what ultimately brought me into the scambaiting world, albeit more than a decade later.

[DerekTrotter1981]

And just what is the Wooden Commodore 64?

[Padme]

I managed to get my own share of receiving mail from scammers by signing something called the muguguestbook (have any of you heard of it?)

Yes. It was created by a member of 419eater many years ago and continues to be an excellent way to bring lads to your inbox.

[ZenosParadoxes]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... od/305903/

Reading about it was one of those “no way...” moments.

[bware419ers]

what is the Wooden Commodore 64?

Oh, the irony...https://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm

[DerekTrotter1981]

Looks like I'm not the only baiter to use the Derek Trotter identity!

So this Derek sent a lad a wooden copy of a computer keyboard?

[Bertje]

No. Derek made a lad send him one...

[DerekTrotter1981]

Ah...

I congratulate that version of Derek for not just including Derek in that bait, but also his brother and arch enemy!

[Rynok]

For me, I'd seen a couple of websites that talked about people doing it (as well as having briefly scanned a book at Barnes and Noble that someone had actually published where they had done it a lot), as well as having seen a few YouTube videos where the person records themselves messing around with scammers (usually those who call claiming to be with the IRS or Microsoft tech support). It always sounded very interesting (and yes, I have to plead guilty to having gotten a few good chuckles out of seeing people pranking scammers). So I started doing it a bit myself, and actually came across this site while doing an Internet search to see if there were any websites out there that offered advice on how to go about doing it more effectively.

[MRNTheMoose]

Was clicking around on wikipedia back in high school and randomly came across scambaiting after reading about a few types of scams. Was active back on the old 419eater, forgot my account name (was one of my many personas), but gave up when I went to college. Just graduated this year and am bored in lockdown, and the thought to get back into it randomly came to me today so I opened a new account and a few new gmails to match. Cheers!

[ab3787]

it's just too much of them nowadays and it's a disaster online casino real money

[Efeboss]

It started when I began to watch Monetized Youtube Baiter's scambaiting content. The idea of the "how about I do scambaiting myself?" question.