Several years back I began to receive the scam emails from Nigeria. I’m sure you are familiar with these so I won’t go into a great explanation. Normally, I can just ignore them, but these were coming to an email pertaining to a domain that I owned for my computer repair business.
It started with a few, and then grew to about 20 per day - every single day. It was irritating to get an email notification only to find out that it was one of these BS emails.
I thought…what to do, what to do…then I had an idea.
I went to Angelfire and created a free website with nothing more than a counter on it.
I shelled out to a command prompt and wrote a batch file that when executed erased boot.ini, nrldr, ntdetect.com then launched a browser which loaded the website I had created (I put a pause in it, silently recursing the windows directory just to make sure their PC made it to the website) then it would shut down the PC.
For those of you not in the ‘know’, this will prevent a computer from booting, stopping at a black screen displaying an error message. A good tech could have it back up and going with not much issue, but I was betting against that - after all, this is Nigeria.
I packaged the file into a password protected zip file and emailed it back to a few scammers stating that ‘This was given to me by the bank, and contains my banking and credit card information. It is set to give a false virus warning to stop scammers, the password for the first file is <password>. Please do not steal my information, I trust you’.
Within 2 days, the counter on my website had went from 3 (where I tested it) to over 140.
I have YET to receive another email from scammers at this email address.
From what I understand, they hack each others email in hopes of stealing ‘victims’ from each other. I hope that the down-time I forced upon them was enough to allow for at least a few people to be educated about this scam.