By Ilya Kochanov
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
What with everyone’s personal information being so readily available on the internet, you’ve probably received mail from an obscure Nigerian prince wanting to transfer millions of dollars into your bank account. Perhaps you’ve even struck some incredibly large inheritance from a relative you didn’t even know you had. That, my friends, is the infamous 419 scam.
There are plenty of things to do upon receiving such an email… You can give in and have your identity stolen then violated like some analogy which I can’t figure out at the moment, or fight back and have said scammer do something ridiculous to induce much hilarity for weeks to come.
419eater.com has been counter-scamming people who try to steal your identity for a while however, their most recent shenanigans are the best we’ve ever seen. Some guy receives a 419 asking for bank info and after calmly refusing to give anything away, informs the scammer that he is paying $100 per-page of hand written content for some government project. The scammer then proceeds to hand write all 293 pages of the first Harry Potter book. Ha!
If you read the accompanying material in 10 page intervals you’ll see that there was a small army of people who helped write this stuff.
Harry Potter & The Well of Scammers