419eater.com
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419eater.com is a website dedicated to scam baiting by individuals who have turned the tables on 419 fraud con artists. These are people who use email to try to fool people into sending money with the promise of a large reward or request for assistance. While the majority of the scammers targeted are perpetrators of an advance fee fraud scam, there are others who solicit donations without promise of a return on investment.
The website chronicles various reverse scams with email threads and commentary by the participants. Often, the would-be scammers are made to pose for photographs that put them in silly poses or hold up humorous signs. One prevalent sign is "I recommend 419eater".
In some cases, the reverse scammers manage to get the scammers to send them money with a ploy similar to the original flim flam. According to the website, the proceeds of such reverse scams are given to a local charity.
The website was created by Mike, who is known by the name of Shiver Metimbers, founded the site when he decided to take action against the many 419 scam e-mails he had received. The 419 Eater forum is very large and has several thousand registered users. Many scambaiting techniques, including the ASEM bait, originated in the forum.
Fake bank busting
The 419 Eater community also engages in the activity of identifying and removing fake banks and other scammer websites from the internet. It does this in coöperation with The Artists Against 419 (http://www.aa419.org) who host a large, publicly accessible database of fake banks. A large portion of their forum is dedicated to identifying and verifying fake banks.
419eater's anti-racism policy
"It should be made very clear that in no way do we target people of a certain skin colour; we simply respond to scam emails that we receive, and it is a sad fact that most of them do seem to originate from Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Sierra Leone, and South Africa." -- from 419eater.com's disclaimer
"This site in NO WAY endorses racism. Scambaiting is NOT a racist activity. Anyone with racist views is most definitely NOT welcome on this site. 419eater maintains a ZERO tolerance policy towards racism." -- Another disclaimer