Artists Against 419

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The Artists Against 419 home page.

Artists Against 419 (commonly abbreviated to AA419) is an Internet community dedicated to identifying and shutting down 419 scam websites.

The site was set up in October 2003 and began tackling fake banks in an artistic way: by hotlinking their images to drain their small bandwidth allowance over their monthly limit. Over time the fake banks evolved and so have the Artists. On November 30, 2003, the Artists Against 419 hosted its first international flash mob^{see below}. There have been many subsequent mobbings designed to make hosters aware that the internet community will not tolerate hosters knowingly hosting criminal websites.

At the same time, they started to list the fraudulent sites that members had found, so that potential scam victims would see their website and be warned when looking for the sites to which the scammers direct them. This list now contains more than 12,000 websites (as of January 23, 2007), and is one of the world's largest databases of fraudulent websites.

Sophisticated tools are used to search for fake sites. Once a site is proved to be fake, it is entered into the database, and the hoster is contacted with the evidence and asked to close down the fraudulent site. Frequently, fake sites are closed within days of being set up. As great care is taken to check each site before it is listed, the AA419 website is increasingly used by law enforcement agencies as a source of information.^{[citation needed]} The UK Metropolitan Police force is reported to work with AA419. ^[1]

AA419 has good relations with many webhosting companies who themselves have no wish to host dishonest sites and cooperate willingly by closing down the fake sites once the evidence is presented. However, a few companies fail to respond to even the most solid evidence, and in such circumstances AA419 arranges a virtual sit-in.

[edit] Flash-mobbing

AA419 describes its action as flash-mobbing but in actuality, this activity is called a virtual sit-in. Virtual sit-ins entail large numbers of individuals intently visiting a target site and downloading pages or requesting large numbers of information, with the intent that their requests will cause a rapid drain of bandwidth, thereby exhausting the site's quota so that it goes offline. A computer flash-mob is a similar case where the sites sudden popularity brings an unexpected large numbers of visitors which the server is unable to handle.
In some cases, particularly when a small web-hosting company is involved, the volume of traffic can be so large that access is slowed to all sites on the server, but as soon as the hoster pulls the criminal site, things return to normal. No site is "mobbed" until at least two letters have been sent to the hosting company warning them that they are hosting a fraudulent site, detailing the evidence and requesting that it be pulled for violating the hoster's terms of business. The Artists would rather have webhosters cooperate to clean up the web, and a virtual sit-in is used as a tool of last resort.

The artists have had considerable success in closing these sites, since out of the 10,500 sites listed in their database, 583 are still active and some of these will be very recent additions (as of November 20, 2006).

[edit] References

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