Spam Research!

The origin of the Nigerian spam is still not known. There are lots of confusions and opinions about its origin. Some say that the scam was introduced by Nigerian Petroleum Companies in the 1970s and 80s. There are also assumptions that some criminal gangs were also involved in the process.

There is also a presumption that the scam is of more than a hundred years of age. The spammers were located in the regions of Lagos, Aba, Owerri, and Nigeria till 2001. The spammers have recently set up their base in many countries and places other than Nigeria. It includes Netherlands, Togo, Canada and many more.

419 Guestbook Spamming

Scammers sometimes largely depend upon the guestbook entries to harvest usable mail addresses. The 419 guestbook spam is a type of scam in which spammers attempt to mark their guestbook. The spammers thus generate plenty of entries in various thus searching a search engine on a particular topic would give number of results.

Mugu

419 spammers use this code word to collect addresses from website guestbook. They use invalid entries to mark guestbook already collected for spamming. The main motive behind this venture is to prevent other scammers from doing the same spamming which would cause victims to raise doubts on the same. If you search for mugu@mugu.com, or mugu@yahoo.com, it would show thousands of entries in various guest books. If you have a guestbook on your site, it is always advisable not to display the addresses to other visitors. If your website has any log files for guestbook entries, then it is better to find out the IP addresses of mugu postings and block them in your website using .htaccess file.

Scam baiting

Scam baiting in simple words, is wasting the precious time of a spammer pretending that you are interested in their schemes. It is a method of entertaining the baiter and pretending as if you are ready to perform some ludicrous tasks. Thus indirectly you are keeping the spammers from potential victims who may fall in trap with the spammers.

Many internet groups have now started to do this process. But this process involves risks too in the sense if the spammers are criminals or problematic people; there are chances of revenge once they come to know about the baiting. It is always advised to keep all the information imaginary so that there are fewer chances of risks.