One Trick Pony


August 24, 2004

Fighting Back Against 419 Spam

Category: cyberculture – Bernie Dodge – 6:18 pm

I was listening to a program on NPR tonight in which they interviewed someone who responded to the ubiquitous Nigerian spammers by engaging the writer in a counterscam, one that required the Nigerian to join the fictitious Church of the Painted Breast. Hilarity, of course, ensued.

By trimming back the URL, I found that this was just one example of a much larger world of Scambaiting with many efforts underway. Even though McLuhan foresaw that we would all be part of a global village, could he possibly have imagined all this?