The Art of the Spam

Rob Rohan wrote an excellent rant in his open letter to spammers, too bad they really don't care.  I couldn't find exact figures of how much of the population was taken in by scammers, but telemarketing scams alone accounted for $4 Billion dollars last year.  That's a huge chunk of change, considering that it only comes from a percentage of the population, most likely those who failed to listen to the adages of their parents and fall for the "too good to be true" schemes of the con artist. 

The INTERNET is a rich fertile landscape for the grifter, the technology is still complex for a large part of the population which lets the con artist ply their falsehoods and at the same time providing the ideal mechanism of free distribution through bot armies and a totally free transmission medium for casting a wide enough net that even a small catch relative to the target distribution can provide an enormous payoff.

The wiki has an excellent article on the Confidence Trick.  To protect yourself, you have to twist your mind a bit and to some extent, think like a con artist.  

You can have some fun with con artists through baiting.  Even the big boys bait.  Instead of them wasting your time, you make a game out of it by wasting theirs and in so doing, preventing them from scamming some other poor fool, just don't assume you can out con a con and study a little bit on how not to leave an identifying trail back to you for your own protection. 

Baiting works because while the distribution methods are free, it still comes down to some type of personal interaction for most scams to handle the "play" of the con.  You decide how much you want to communicate back and forth between the con artist.  

Now there are a lot of precautions you should take such as making sure you're well protected from viruses as well as creating an alternate identity via email and such.  I personally use a VMWARE snapshot system that is completely isolated (no VMWARE tools installed on a stand alone system, other computers shut off) to work with.  When I'm done I simply revert the snapshot before shutting down. 

I don't suggest making any phone calls.  You have to be fairly knowledgeable about which phone prefixes can have a charge associated with them and it's not just 900 numbers anymore.  Definitely don't let them call you to prevent any method of charging against your phone number.  Remember, think sneaky.  See how long you draw them out, if they try to get a phone number, play a deaf gambit such as you don't own a phone or you don't have a phone tty and you must use email.