Cugat – That is sort of true. Baiting can hurt people because some baiters push the line into doing bad things to scammers, as we know.

Thanks for the comments all!

Snoskred
http://www.snoskred.org

And baiting doesn’t hurt anyone, so I’m all for it.

Cugat

I know you didn’t ask others to do it, but still… when I read it, I just expressed what I thought openly.

You will be unhappy to know that the scammers are moving to your neck of the woods – the pickings are rich in India. They are scamming more and more people there. People who don’t really understand what is going on with the scam – and generally people who don’t speak English as their first language.

I tell you why I still do it. In December of 2004 a scam victim was killed. This was back in the days when baiters were working with the South African police. A number of my scambaiting friends knew that this victim was missing because the South African police had asked them for help tracking down any information on those scammers – addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, etc.

When the victim was found dead, he was not recognizable. From information gained from witnesses (who were too scared to do anything) and from the post mortem, they found out that he had been badly beaten, then tied to the back of a vehicle and dragged around, then beaten some more, then they poured gasoline over him and set him alight. While he was still alive and conscious. He could not get up because they had broken almost every bone in his body. He lay there in excrutiating pain, until he died.

If my scambaiting characters can take the focus of one real victim and stop the scammer from being able to concentrate on getting one real victim to travel to see them.. then it is worth it. That’s potentially a life saved.

That victim who died? I think of him every single day. I also think of all the victims I have stopped from travelling by warning them and making phone calls. A lot of that information comes to me from my baiting – scammers send me emails intended for someone else by accident, scammers turn into informants and many times scammers friends and family contact me as the “victim” to warn me off – and then that person becomes an informant.

That is all information I could never get unless I baited these scammers. So for me, it’s worth it.

Breaking their hearts into little pieces, like they do to their victims? That’s just a side effect. Maybe it teaches them how hurtful their actions can be. Maybe once they grow a heart, they might use it to stop scamming. I don’t know. But I do know thousands of victims have been warned thanks to *my* scambaiting alone. And that is worthwhile.

Cheers,
Snoskred

No, I know that scammers are criminals (sometimes violent) and the reasons why you do scam-baiting.

But it still doesn’t feel right to me.

Apologies for the dissenting opinion.