419eater.com

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419eater.com is a scam baiting website which focuses on advance fee fraud. The website founder and CEO, Michael Berry, goes by the alias Shiver Metimbers. The 419 Eater forum has over 20,000 registered accounts, although not all of these belong to active members.

1 Concept
2 References
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Concept

The website chronicles various reverse scams with e-mail threads and commentary by the participants. The site hosts photographs of individuals reported to be scammers in humorous poses, or holding signs such as "I recommend 419eater". This practice has received criticism from people who call some of the pictures humiliating (as some scambaiters take advantage of the scammers' poorer English skills and get them to hold signs with humiliating phrases such as "I shag sheep" or "arse bandit") though Berry points out that anyone posing for such pictures is doing it of their own free will.

In some cases, the scambaiter claims to have had the scammers send them money with a ploy similar to the original flim flam. According to the website, the proceeds of such reverse scams was given to a local charity. The moderators of the site, as well as an overwhelming majority of the members, have taken a stand against so-called cash baiting or its discussion on 419eater^[1]. Shiver has added a disclaimer to baits where he tried to receive money, pointing out that not only is it technically illegal to do, but the scammers are generally dangerous people and stealing money from them can be extremely dangerous.

The 419eater community also engages in the activity of identifying and removing fake banks and other websites created by the scammers from the Internet. It does this in cooperation with Artists Against 419 which host a large, publicly accessible database of fake banks.

Berry was a featured guest on BBC Radio 2's "The Jeremy Vine Show" on 1st November 2006. Berry has also collected some of the scambaits shown on website, and some unpublished ones, to a book Greetings in Jesus Name!: The Scambaiter Letters (Harbour Books Ltd., ISBN 1905128088).