Scamorama

by Eve Edelson

This book is about liars telling lies with compound interest to other liars. A -struggle is being waged on the Internet between criminals and comedians. On one side are fraudsters who con their victims out of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. The basic tool of the trade is e-mail, and the crime is the infamous “419” scam—a form of fraud whose current masters hail from Nigeria and which gets its name from section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code. It begins with an e-mail from a
I am soliciting your assistance as to enable my family round up the remains of our life. Following the death of my husband Sani Abacha, former head of state of Nigeria, the new president has turned the country against us . . . I will be grateful if you could receive my last $50 million for safe keeping. I will give you 10% as a commission and to cover any expenses . . .
On the other side of the struggle, pranksters from around the world are writing back to scammers strictly to waste their time. The resulting literary genre is - scambaiting —psychological warfare for clowns. Some anti-scammers go further, breaking into scammers’ e-mail accounts to warn off their victims, and helping law enforcement.
This book documents a weird form of cultural exchange made possible by the Internet. It is a hilarious introduction to the “419” scam, with correspondences between scammers and people who love to yank their chains.

Genres: Nonfiction

215 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Dear sir/miss; my father was a general who was enprisoned as a radical element during a friendly coup. In a Swiss bank is deposit 14 million dollar that needs to transfer more soon - can you help my dear friend?" This book looks at people who turned the tables on 419 scammers - the 'hoops' they made them jump through will bring a smile to the face of anyone who has ever had to deal with this annoying scam. Just on this site I have been contacted by several of these scammers - you would think it would occur to them that people who read lots of books may not be the best place to ply their trade!

[Charles Berman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eve Edelson's print spinoff from her popular "scambaiting" website begins with the advantage of a collection of tongue-in-cheek exchanges by witty people with hapless e-mail scammers that comtain some of the funniest pages I've read. The combination of funny and inventive writing (in which the scam-baiter is free to let comic invention run free aeemingly without fear of being disbelieved) and the real-life befuddlement and endless credulity of the despicable but still somehow likable scammers is immensely entertaining and inexhaustible. These segments are called "comedy breaks" but they are certainly no less worthwhile than that which surrounds them.

In the rest of the book Edelson does a great job of introducing the subject both as international crime study and hobby, explaining how and why this bizarre and fascinating industry works. There's a surreal world beneath the puzzling Nigerian e-mails we all get, and "Scamorama" handels being a way into that world from many angles -- that of the potential scam-baiter, the general reader for humor and entertainment, the reader interested in crime, and the potential victim.

This is all done with a lot of wit and in entertaining prose. The publisher might not have wanted to take a risk on a longer book about such an unusual subject, but it's a credit to the author (and the contributors to her website) that I wished it had.

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fun read, but I admittedly skimmed much of the latter half. Not that it's not useful or funny, it just turns out to be a pretty thin topic for a whole book. Most internet users have seen a thousand variations on these scams, so the antics themselves become tedious to read about, and we don't really need help determining which are bogus (hint: all of them). What's interesting are the exchanges between scammers and the anti-scammers keeping them on the hook and wasting their time.

[Carrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was fun reading for the first half, then it just seemed like more of the same in the second half. That being said, reading the perspective of the scammer was interesting. I had to just shake my head for much of the book, not understanding how people can fall for these types of scams.