Doctoral Thesis: Artistic anti-fraud activism against online advance fee fraud

 

Doctoral thesis:  “Artistic anti-fraud activism against online advance fee fraud”

by: Mag. Andreas Zingerle
supervised by: Univ. Prof. Mag. Gitti Vasicek

Viva comission: A. Univ. Prof. Mag. Rainer Zendron, Univ. Prof. Mag. Gitti Vasicek, Reni Hofmüller, Dipl. Ing. (FH) Martin Kaltenbrunner.

Abstract:
This dissertation investigates the role of vigilante online communities of scambaiters in their endeavors against Internet fraud. By analysing online forums I identified different types of scambaiters, and I tested their strategies and tools in artistic case studies and workshops. This research is motivated by two main research questions: (1) Based on the scambaiters’ actions and motives, should they be considered Internet activists or digital vigilantes?; and (2) How can their strategies be translated into a practice of creative activism?
In order to work on these questions, my research investigated how storytelling, social engineering, data security and communication technologies are used by these groups. The workshops served as an opportunity to experiment with new tools and discuss their moral implications, while in the artistic case studies I tested the strategies for their activist potential. Previous research on the scambainting communities have focused on the virally shared photos that portray scammers in humiliating postures. The findings of my research show that the scambaiting communities are far more diverse than previously assumed. Therefore the most important contribution of this thesis was to show that scambaiters also use various activist tactics. Hence certain scambaiter communities can be defined as anti-fraud activists who serve the Internet community. In the scope of this dissertation I further discuss the results of the artistic case studies, implications for the perception of scambaiting communities, and I also bring forth areas of future research.

Please contact me (mail@andreaszingerle.com) if you want to read the full thesis!

 

Acknowledgements:

I would like to address special thanks to my advisor Univ. Prof. Mag. Brigitte Vasicek for her advice during the work on my thesis. I particularly want to thank my wife Linda Kronman for her artistic collaboration in all the case studies and her critical feedback throughout the years. I would also like to express my gratitude to my Erasmus+ Teaching mobility hosts Tonguc Ibrahim Sezen from the Department of Communication and Management at the Bilgi university, Istanbul (Turkey), and Jill and Scott Rettberg from the Digital Cultures Research Group at the University of Bergen (Norway). Special thanks also go to members of the Interactive Digital Storytelling conference Steering commitee and I want to thank especially Hartmut Koenitz and Alex Mitchell for their inspiration and ongoing feedback. I want to thank Us(c)hi Reiter from servus.at for the collaboration on the ‘Behind the Smart World’ Artlab, the process development for the publication and the possibility to curate the exhibition during the ‘Art meets radical openness’ Festival 2016. I want to thank the ‘esc – medien kunst labor’ and especially Reni Hofmüller for making the exhibition, workshop and artist talk possible during the Steirischer Herbst 2015. I also want to thank Tim and Tina from Time’s up for their invitation to the ‘PARN – Narrative Strategies’ symposium in Madeira in 2013. I want to thank Gerhard Funk for the opportunity to teach a ‘419-fiction’ lecture at the Webscience Masters program. Last but not least I want to thank the proofreaders Chinmoyi Patel, Rusha Shukla and especially Aileen Derieg for proofreading my papers and the thesis.

 

References:

[Atkins and Huang, 2013] Atkins, B. and Huang, W. (2013). A study of social engineering in online frauds. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 1(3):23.

[Bansal and Arora, 2012] Bansal, A. and Arora, M. (2012). Ethical Hacking and Social Security. Radix International Journal of Research in Social Science, 1(11).

[Bazzichelli, 2013] Bazzichelli, T. (2013). Networked Disruption: Rethinking Op- positions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking. Depart- ment of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University.

[Berg, 1995] Berg, A. (1995). Cracking a social engineer. Computers & Security, 8(14):700.

[Berry, 2006] Berry, M. (2006). Greetings in Jesus Name!: The Scambaiter Let- ters. Harbour Books.

[Bregant and Bregant, 2014] Bregant, J. and Bregant, R. (2014). Cybercrime and computer crime.

[Brenner, 2007] Brenner, S. W. (2007). Private-public sector cooperation in com- bating cybercrime: In search of a model. J. Int’l Com. L. & Tech., 2:58.

[Brunton, 2012] Brunton, F. (2012). Spam. Mit Press.

[Buchanan and Grant, 2001] Buchanan, J. and Grant, A. J. (2001). Investigating and prosecuting Nigerian fraud. United States Attorneys’ Bulletin, 49(6):39–47.

[Burrell, 2008] Burrell, J. (2008). Problematic empowerment: West African In- ternet scams as strategic misrepresentation. Information Technologies & Inter- national Development, 4(4):pp. 15–30.

[Burrell, 2012] Burrell, J. (2012). Invisible users: Youth in the Internet cafes of urban Ghana. Mit Press.

[Byrne, 2013] Byrne, D. N. (2013). 419 digilantes and the frontier of radical justice online. Radical History Review, 2013(117):70–82.

[Cain, 2004] Cain, P. (2004). Scam trap. The Toronto Star, http://www. thestar. com, referenced March, 21:2011.

[Cambaiter, 2012] Cambaiter, W. S. (2012). Hello Sweaty. CreateSpace Indepen- dent Publishing Platform.

[Carroll and Essik, 2008] Carroll, C. and Essik, P. (2008). High-tech trash. Na- tional Geographic, 213(1):64–81.

[Cha, 2005] Cha, A. E. (2005). Watchdogs Seek Out The Web’s Bad Side. The Washington Post.

[Cheong and Gong, 2010] Cheong, P. H. and Gong, J. (2010). Cyber vigilantism, transmedia collective intelligence, and civic participation. Chinese Journal of Communication, 3(4):471–487.

[Colacello, 2014] Colacello, B. (2014). Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up. Vin- tage.

[Conway, 2007] Conway, M. (2007). Terrorism and internet governance: Core issues. In Disarmament Forum, volume 2007, pages 23–34. United Nations.

[Cox, 2013] Cox, J. (2013). Mexico’s Drug Cartels Love Social Media | VICE | United States. VICE.

[Crawford, 2013] Crawford, A. (2013). Computer-generated ’Sweetie’ catches on- line predators. BBC News.

[Deceglie and Robertson, 2012] Deceglie, A. and Robertson, K. (2012). Taliban using Facebook to lure Aussie soldier. DailyTelegraph.

[Dena, 2010] Dena, C. (2010). Transmedia practice: Theorising the practice of expressing a fictional world across distinct media and environments. PhD thesis, University of Sydney.

[Egan et al., 2011] Egan, V., Hoskinson, J., and Shewan, D. (2011). Perverted justice: A content analysis of the language used by offenders detected attempt- ing to solicit children for sex. Antisocial behavior: Causes, correlations and treatments, 20(3):273.

[Ethington, 1987] Ethington, P. J. (1987). Vigilantes and the police: The creation of a professional police bureaucracy in San Francisco, 1847-1900. Journal of Social History, pages 197–227.

[Freiermuth, 2011] Freiermuth, M. (2011). This transaction is 100% risk- free!’Why do people fall prey to e-mail scams. In International Conference on Language and Communication (LANCOMM), pages 222–230.

[Fukuyama, 1996] Fukuyama, F. (1996). Trust: The Social Virtues and The Cre- ation of Prosperity. Free Press, 1st free press pbk. ed edition edition.

[Gabrys, 2011] Gabrys, J. (2011). Digital rubbish: A natural history of electronics. University of Michigan Press.

[Glassman and Kang, 2012] Glassman, M. and Kang, M. J. (2012). Intelligence in the internet age: The emergence and evolution of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2):673–682.

[Goffman, 1952] Goffman, E. (1952). On cooling the mark out: Some aspects of adaptation to failure. Psychiatry, 15(4):451–463.

[Greenwald, 2013] Greenwald, G. (2013). XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ’nearly everything a user does on the internet’. The Guardian.

[Hartikainen, 2006] Hartikainen, E. (2006). The Nigerian Scam: easy money on the Internet, but for whom. In unpublished paper presented at Michicagoan Conference.

[Hogan, 2012] Hogan, M. (2012). Mads Brgger, ”The Ambassador” Director, Takes Exploitation To A Whole New Level. The Huffington Post.

[Ho ̈ller, 2013] H ̈oller, H. (2013). Threatening fake news | Herwig G. Ho ̈ller – springer|in 1/13: Anti-Humanism. Springerin.

[Hotz-Davies et al., 2008] Hotz-Davies, I., Kirchhofer, A., and Leppanen, S. (2008). Internet fictions. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

[Huey et al., 2012] Huey, L., Nhan, J., and Broll, R. (2012). Uppity civilians and cyber-vigilantes: The role of the general public in policing cyber-crime. Criminology and Criminal Justice, page 1748895812448086.

[Husa ́k and Cegan, 2014] Husa ́k, M. and Cegan, J. (2014). PhiGARo: Automatic Phishing Detection and Incident Response Framework. In Availability, Relia- bility and Security (ARES), 2014 Ninth International Conference on, pages 295–302. IEEE.

[Isacenkova et al., 2013] Isacenkova, J., Thonnard, O., Costin, A., Balzarotti, D., and Francillon, A. (2013). Inside the scam jungle: A closer look at 419 scam email operations. In Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2013 IEEE, pages 143–150. IEEE.

[Jenkins, 2006] Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. NYU press.

[Jenkins, 2011] Jenkins, H. (2011). Keynote: Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Five Key Principles of Transmedia Entertainment. MIT TechTV, http://techtv. mit. edu/, referenced March, 29:2011.

[Kac, 1992] Kac, E. (1992). Aspects of the aesthetics of telecommunications. In

International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques: ACM SIGGRAPH 92 Visual Proceedings, volume 1992, pages 47–57.

[Kaulback and Datta, 2010] Kaulback, G. R. and Datta, G. (2010). System and method for revealing hidden information in electronic documents. Google Patents.

[Keefer, 2005] Keefer, J. E. (2005). Four narrative styles in transmedia story- telling. MIT’s Media-in-Transition Conference may.

[Kich, 2005] Kich, M. (2005). A rhetorical analysis of fund-transfer-scam solici- tations. Cerceles, 14:129–42.

[Kirschenbaum, 2008] Kirschenbaum, M. G. (2008). Mechanisms: New media and the forensic imagination. Mit Press.

[Kohm, 2009] Kohm, S. A. (2009). Naming, shaming and criminal justice: Mass- mediated humiliation as entertainment and punishment. Crime, Media, Cul- ture, 5(2):188–205.

[Kringiel, 2012] Kringiel, D. (2012). Echte Superhelden Der Maskenmann von nebenan. Spiegel Online.

[Kronman and Zingerle, 2015] Kronman, L. and Zingerle, A. (2015). Behind the Smart World – saving, deleting, resurfacing data. servus.at.

[Lambert, 2012] Lambert, J. (2012). Digital storytelling: Capturing lives, creating community. Routledge.

[Laorden et al., 2013] Laorden, C., Gala ́n-Garc ́ıa, P., Santos, I., Sanz, B., Hi- dalgo, J. M. G., and Bringas, P. G. (2013). Negobot: A conversational agent based on game theory for the detection of paedophile behaviour. pages 261–270. Springer.

[Lapsley, 2013] Lapsley, P. (2013). Exploding the phone: The untold story of the teenagers and outlaws who hacked Ma Bell. Grove Press.

[Lea, 2009] Lea, S. E. (2009). The economic psychology of scams Stephen EG Lea, Peter Fischer and Kath M. Evans School of Psychology, University of Exeter, UK.

[Long, 2007] Long, G. A. (2007). Transmedia storytelling: Business, aesthetics and production at the Jim Henson Company. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology.

[Longe et al., 2010] Longe, O. B., Mbarika, V., Kourouma, M., Wada, F., and Isabalija, R. (2010). Seeing beyond the surface, understanding and tracking fraudulent cyber activities. arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.1993.

[Maggi, 2010] Maggi, F. (2010). Are the con artists back? a preliminary analysis of modern phone frauds. In Computer and Information Technology (CIT), 2010 IEEE 10th International Conference on, pages 824–831. IEEE.

[Mann, 2012] Mann, M. I. (2012). Hacking the human: social engineering tech- niques and security countermeasures. Gower Publishing, Ltd.

[Mitnick and Simon, 2011] Mitnick, K. D. and Simon, W. L. (2011). The art of deception: Controlling the human element of security. John Wiley & Sons.

[Nakamura, 2014] Nakamura, L. (2014). ?I WILL DO EVERYthing That Am Asked?: Scambaiting, Digital Show-Space, and the Racial Violence of Social Media. Journal of Visual Culture, 13(3):257–274.

[Ogwezzy, 2012] Ogwezzy, M. C. (2012). Cyber Crime and the Proliferation of Yahoo Addicts in Nigeria. AGORA Int’l J. Jurid. Sci., page 86.

[Palumbo, 2000] Palumbo, J. (2000). Social Engineering: What is it, why is so little said about it and what can be done? SANS.

[Parikka, 2012] Parikka, J. (2012). New materialism as media theory: Mediana- tures and dirty matter. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 9(1):95– 100.

[Pearson, 2009] Pearson, E. (2009). All the World Wide Web?s a stage: The performance of identity in online social networks. First Monday, 14(3).

[Perlroth, 2012] Perlroth, N. (2012). LinkedIn breach exposes light security even at data companies.

[Renov, 1993] Renov, M. (1993). Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routlege. Inc (AFI Film Readers).

[Riedel, 2015] Riedel, F. (2015). Sakawa-the spirit of cyberfraud: Analysis of a ru- mour complex in ghana. Racism, Ethnicity and the Media in Africa: Mediating Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, page 261.

[Rustad, 2001] Rustad, M. L. (2001). Private enforcement of cybercrime on the electronic frontier. 11:63.

[Ryan, 2012] Ryan, M.-L. (2012). Medien-Erzaehlen-Gesellschaft: transmediales Erzaehlen im Zeitalter der Medienkonvergenz. De Gruyter.

[Stabek et al., 2010] Stabek, A., Watters, P., and Layto, R. (2010). The seven scam types: mapping the terrain of cybercrime. In Cybercrime and Trustworthy Computing Workshop (CTC), 2010 Second, pages 41–51. IEEE.

[Stoate, 2007] Stoate, R. (2007). Internet Detectives: Performativity and Policing Authenticity on the Internet. Dichtung Digital.

[Tade and Aliyu, 2011] Tade, O. and Aliyu, I. (2011). Social organization of in- ternet fraud among university undergraduates in Nigeria. International Journal of Cyber Criminology, 5(2):860–875.

[Toschi, 2009] Toschi, A. (2009). The Entertainment Revolution: Does Trans- media Storytelling Really Enhance the Audience Experience. California State University Fullerton, pages 33–170.

[Tuovinen et al., 2007] Tuovinen, L., Ro ̈ning, J., Tuovinen, L., and R ̈oning, J. (2007). Baits and beatings: vigilante justice in virtual communities. Proceedings of CEPE, pages 397–405.

[Wang et al., 2009] Wang, B., Hou, B., Yao, Y., and Yan, L. (2009). Human flesh search model incorporating network expansion and gossip with feedback. In Proceedings of the 2009 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Dis- tributed Simulation and Real Time Applications, pages 82–88. IEEE Computer Society.

[Warner, 2011] Warner, J. (2011). Understanding cyber-crime in ghana: A view from below. 5:736–749.

[Warner, 2012] Warner, J. (2012). Human Security and the” Double Jump”: A Critical Analysis of Electronic Waste in Ghana. Journal of Human Security, 8(1):4.

[Wik, 2010] Wik, A. (2010). Experiences. The Transmedial Expansion of the Ma- trix Universe. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, (02):73– 90.

[Wood, 2014] Wood, M. (2014). Flaw calls for altering passwords, experts say.

[Yi-Tsen, 2011] Yi-Tsen, L. (2011). The power of online public opinion. a case study on human-flesh search.

[Zhuo-chao, 2009] Zhuo-chao, Y. (2009). The legitimate limit of human flesh search engine. Public Administration & Law, 7:039.

[Zingerle, 2014a] Zingerle, A. (2014a). The art of trickery: Methods to establish first contact in internet scams. In xCoAx Conference, Porto, Portugal (June 26, 2014).

[Zingerle, 2014b] Zingerle, A. (2014b). How to obtain passwords of online scam- mers by using social engineering methods. In Cyberworlds (CW), 2014 Inter- national Conference on, pages 340–344. IEEE.

[Zingerle, 2014c] Zingerle, A. (2014c). Remain anonymous, create characters and backup stories: Online tools used in internet crime narratives. In Interactive Storytelling, pages 81–90. Springer.

[Zingerle, 2015] Zingerle, A. (2015). Skyler and Bliss Original Citation Adkins, Monty and Segretier, Laurent (2015) Skyler and Bliss. In: xCoAx 2015: Proceedings of the Third Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics and X. Universidade do Porto, Porto, page 52.

[Zingerle, 2016] Zingerle, A. (2016). Trust us and our business expands! how net-activists take down fake business websites. In: xCoAx 2016: Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics and X. University of Bergamo, Italy.

[Zingerle and Kronman, 2013a] Zingerle, A. and Kronman, L. (2013a). Faceless patrons-an augmented installation exploring 419-fictional narratives. In Inter- active Storytelling, pages 245–248. Springer.

[Zingerle and Kronman, 2013b] Zingerle, A. and Kronman, L. (2013b). Humil- iating Entertainment or Social Activism? Analyzing Scambaiting Strategies Against Online Advance Fee Fraud. In Cyberworlds (CW), 2013 International Conference on, pages 352–355. IEEE.

[Zingerle and Kronman, 2013c] Zingerle, A. and Kronman, L. (2013c). Icids 2013 workshop: Revisiting the spam folder–using 419-fiction for interactive story- telling. In Interactive Storytelling: 6th International Conference, ICIDS 2013, Istanbul, Turkey, November 6-9, 2013, Proceedings, volume 8230, page 279. Springer.

[Zingerle and Kronman, 2013d] Zingerle, A. and Kronman, L. (2013d). Re: Dakar arts festival-exploring transmedia storytelling methods to document an internet scam. pages 253–256.

[Zuckoff, 2006] Zuckoff, M. (2006). The perfect mark. The New Yorker, 15.