Internet Crime and Anti-Fraud Activism: A Hands-On Approach

Introduction

Cybercrime and online fraud are a growing phenomenon in computer-mediated communications. In 2015 the Internet Complaint Center (IC3) registered over 288,000 complaints; 127,145 reporting a loss on an average of $3,718 (FBI, 2015). In the past, victims were mainly contacted by 'unsolicited bulk emails': now, the widespread use of social networking services, messenger apps and heavy increase of ransomware malware has increased the possibilities for scammers to contact potential victims and infect multiple devices at once. (Bregant, and Bregant, 2014) (Edwards et al., 2017) Scambaiting arose as a counterattack to scams carried out by vigilante online communities who investigate scam emails and implement several social engineering techniques to document, report or warn potential victims. (Atkins, 2013) Scambaiters are persons who reply to scam emails, being fully aware that emails are written by scammers, tricking them into believing that you are a potential victim. This means that scambaiters turn tables and lure the scammers into incredible story-plots, always giving scammers the feeling that they will get a lot of money. (Smallridge et al., 2016) Every scambaiter has their own personal motivation to justify their actions. Tuovinen et al. (2007) illustrate three possible motives: community service (social activism), status elevation and revenge. In workshops the authors emphasized the role of community service by documenting and sharing scambaiter plots, wasting time of scammers and exploiting their resources as well as raising awareness about online fraud. Scambaiting is often portrayed as a practice of humiliating the other. Lisa Nakamura (2014) argues that some of the scammers' photos resemble a 'parody of Christian baptism', whereas others remind her of 'something you have seen from Abu Ghraib', but she also points out that 'images are put out of context' and that they 'rely on users who understand the conditions under which they were created'. Still her conclusion is that the 'main purpose of scambaiting is to humiliate the other'. Often, correspondences are also hard to grasp or make no sense when put out of context since it is never clear what was communicated beforehand over email in order to receive for example a requested photo or a specific document. Dara Byrne (2013) oversimplifies that 'scambaiters are racists' and 'scambaiting tactics have never proved to be useful in crime prevention'. The author’s intention is not to deny that there are subcultures within the scambaiting culture that are humiliating and show racist tendencies. Whereas prior research heavily emphasizes scambaiters motivated by status elevation and revenge, the author’s interest is in understanding other sub-groups that see themselves as netizens who have a duty to provide a service to the internet community.

Over the recent years, the authors formed the 'KairUs Art+Research' (n.d.) collective and followed different vigilante communities who fight against online fraud and implemented their strategies in artistic case studies and workshops. The authors created two different workshop formats:

• 1.

  A general workshop called 'Revisiting the spam folder', where participants received an introduction into spam, scam and online vigilantism with hands-on exercises for beginning a dialog with scammers and developing story worlds using easy access online anonymization tools.

• 2.

  The 'Credible fiction – deceptive realities' workshop that builds upon artistic research conducted for the 'Megacorp.¹'(n.d.) artwork and provided participants with a hands-on approach to collect open source intelligence about fraudulent online businesses.