419 Scammers Hire Zombies to take Revenge on Anti-Scam Sites

9/14/07

Various anti-scam sites including 419Eater, ScamWarners and Artists Against 419 are under attack by hoards of zombie computers. At last check, two of the three previously mentioned sites were offline.

419 Scams attempt to part people from a certain amount of money by promising a much larger sum in return. The scammer claims to be related to deposed royalty in a third-world country located in Africa. He's trying to get his family's fortune of several million dollars out of the country before warlords confiscate it.

To do so, he needs a certain amount of cash for transaction fees or other costs. However, once he has his millions, he'll gladly cut your in for a much larger chunk of change than you originally parted with.

419 scammers often use one of a few dozen different templates. This makes it easy for spam blocker programs to detect them. Also, since the messages most often originate from Nigeria, it's possible to block most of the messages by rejecting email from that country.

SpamNation suggests that the attacks are related to the Zhelatin zombie gang, however this doesn't mean that they were their idea. Zombie gangs make their virtually-stolen computers available to whoever is willing to pay. The most common services are sending spam and denial-of-service attacks.

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