Paper: The Art of Trickery: Methods to establish first contact in Internet scams

Title: The Art of Trickery: Methods to establish first contact in Internet scams
Author(s): Andreas Zingerle
Email: andreas.zingerle (at) ufg.ac.at

Published at: xCoAx conference 2014, Porto, Portugal.

 

Abstract:

Internet scammers use fictional narratives to gain the trust of potential victims. These narratives are often pre-scripted, get send out by individual scammers or scam-groups and are often copied and reused by other scam-gangs. Vigilante online communities of scam baiters try to jam the practices of these Internet scammers by using similar social engineering techniques to hook the scammers into a story and consequently interrupt their workflow. In this paper, through examples, I want to take a closer look at the scammers working methods and focus on two different strategies on how scambaiters use to approach scammers.

 

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