13 Dec 2003-
Someone at The Drogheda Independent noticed Adoptalad.com and ran the following piece:
Local justice as email con artists get conned
I love it. For once the scamsters are being scammed. Drogheda Independent readers will remember our piece two weeks ago on the Liberian email scam. Basically a person sends you an email claiming to be the son of the former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. He informs you that he has ten million dollars to deposit in a bank account, and if he gets your bank details, you’re in for a cut of the money. Happy days? Fat chance. It, like all the other email ‘opportunities’ is a massive scam.
But now irish internet users are hitting back at the scamsters by taking up their most valuable resource – their time! It’s called scam-baiting, and it happens when net surfers attempt to con the con men by stringing them along. One particular site, www.geocities.com/adoptalad is simply hilarious. It plays these people at their own game, taking on the identities of concerned story swallowers, and leading the conmen (known as lads) to believe they have snared someone. But every time the conmen ask for the cheque (there’s always a cheque) the person behind the site, who uses the pseudonym Sean Patrick, thinks up of a wonderful excuse.
‘I told one guy the cheque was late because Ireland had been hit by a huge tidal wave,’ he said. ‘Another of these ‘lads’ believed me when I told him that a volcano was erupting in Athlone!’ Sean also gets the conmen to send him photographs of themselves, holding up signs saying, for example, ‘amadan’ – the Irish for idiot. Another scammer, in the midst of a four month wait for his money, was told to ring up an Irish bank and ask for a special E-JIT form.
Fair play to you Sean. You’ve struck a blow for the scammed!
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