Scamming the scammers

It has been described as the internet's first blood sport and is fast becoming one of the web's favourite pastimes. Fed up with having their inboxes clogged with emails from Nigerian fraudsters promising untold riches, the victims are finally hitting back.

Scam-baiting - replying to the emails and stringing the con artists along with a view to humiliating them as much as possible - is becoming increasingly popular with more than 150 websites chronicling the often hilarious results.

Known as 419 fraud, after the section of the Nigerian penal code that it contravenes, the scam generates millions of pounds each year. According to the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the average loss in the UK stands at around £35,000.

Mike, a 41-year-old computer engineer from Manchester, runs the scam-baiting site 419eater.com,(The Trophy Room is well worth a look , hahahaha ) which started two months ago. 'Almost always the scammer will think you are a real victim and try their best to extract money. It started because I used to get a few emails, and although I knew it was a scam I never knew how it worked. I did some research, found out about scam baiting and decided to have a go. It's now almost a full-time hobby for me.'

Like most baiters, Mike replies in the names of made-up characters. His sites specialise in collecting pictures of the scammers in order to make it more difficult to find new victims. Using the pretext that in order to believe they are real people they need to take a photograph holding up signs with the name of Mike's character, he has succeeded in getting one fraudster to pose with a piece of paper stating: MI Semem Stains. Other sites feature similar pictures with signs reading 'Iama Dildo', 'Mr Bukakke' and 'Ben Dover'.

Taking a leaf out of the 419 gangs' book, most of the scam baiters keep their true identities secret. There have been at least 25 murders linked to the 419 gangs. Last February a retired Czech doctor who had lost more than £400,000 stormed into the Nigerian Embassy in Prague and shot dead the leading consul.

A scam-baiting site run by 'Alexander Kerensky' focuses its efforts on 419 gangs based in Amsterdam. Adopting the persona 'Lillith Cova', an attractive but desperately lonely 27-year-old a