We all hate those pathetic internet scammers. Have you got the one about inheritance money in Nigeria?
Anyway, Andreas, a friend of mine from my csc436 class pointed out this neat website run by a group called Artists against 419’ers, solely dedicated to fighting back internet scammers. The way it works is pretty clever, from a computer science perspective, and it�s not very hard to understand, let me try and explain:
See, when you purchase hosting from an internet site, like my website for example, you pay for something called bandwidth. My website provider allows me to have 5 GB of transfer a month, meaning every time you load this site it takes away from my 5 GB allowance. Now to put these numbers in perspective, a visit to my site will deduct about 45k or .00042915 GB from my 5 total–which as you can see, is tiny, and with my current modest readership, there is just no way in hell I will ever exceed 5GB. But, if for some reason, I get a million people reading my site, instead of, well… 5, I just might go over this allowance.
Using this same idea, this anti-spam group has created a website that you can go to that will keep reloading websites of known spammers. You simply have to go to a website (make sure you internet cache is disabled) and when enough people do this, the websites of these spammers will eventually exceed their allotted bandwidth, bringing their websites down.
Ah yes, sweet revenge.
Here�s the link