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Comment by danbower | Hacker News Reader

419 eater is a site dedicated to exactly that. The general idea is to act totally clueless about everything. They want a scan of your passport? Request instructions on how to use a scanner and do everything wrong. Some people take this a lot further and get scammers on "safari" - a long and expensive trip where the scammer believes they'll be meeting their victim but instead just waste their time and money.

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There's a couple legendary ones on there where the guys have gotten the Nigerians to ship heavy boxes over to USA/UK/Canada and cost them hundreds of dollars in postal fees

There's one where they (possibly) managed to kill the scammer. Or at least convinced him to rent a car and drive to a war-torn muslim-majority country and carry a note into a bank that said, in arabic, "mohammed rapes underage dogs". There was a This American Life about it.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/363/e...

That was genuinely upsetting listening to how desperate the scammer was getting. These guys, sure, steal money. But... That's cruel and unusual, for any person.

A bit much, maybe?

Probably. That was certainly the tone the interviewer took in that radio show. That was my first time I've seen someone do something "for the lulz" and then be confronted by a rational adult and asked to discuss the consequences of their actions.

That's why the memory of the episode stayed with me for so long- that show is from 2008.

Way too much, definitely

I love when he manages to get a scammer to produce an artwork and mail it.

One of my favourites: http://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm

In the same fashion as knodi123, I would laugh a real lot about John Boko if I didn't suspect that the scammer delegated the realization and the costs to a very poor relative.

You may be right. The hope, of course, is there's some form of natural justice achieved in wasting significant amounts of the scammer's time.

There's one where they are convinced to reenact the Dead Parrot Sketch which is quite something:

https://youtu.be/YM5QMKLjjm8

They're actually not too bad at acting

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