The 419 scam: information warfare on the spam front and a proposal for local filtering

摘要

The infamous '419' advance fee fraud scam is a major source of spam which takes its victims for hundreds of millions of dollars yearly. Email headers confirm that much of this traffic currently comes out of Lagos and Amsterdam. 419ers also create phony bank websites. Ad hoc information warfare has begun in which anti-scammers hijack these websites as well as scammers' email accounts. Spam legislation will not stop these particular emails. Filtering outgoing mail, as close as practical to the source, could suppress that portion of the fraud carried out by email, at least in the short term. [References: 12]