I've only recently (past four months) started getting regular bouts of the
Nigeria spam. However, the Nigerian '419' scammers' prolific spamming
activities cause the most recent, though of course very rare (thanks
Stalker), crash of one of our mail servers. They sent 19,000 emails
overnight to SIMS running on a (docked) Duo 2300. I shifted that server
over to an iMac 500 and the next round of 20,000 messages that came in was
handled with no problems.
More information on the Nigerian '419' scam can be found on
http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/ Here is an excerpt:
"A Five Billion US$ (as of 1996, much more now) worldwide Scam which has
run since the early 1980's under Successive Governments of Nigeria. It is
also referred to as "Advance Fee Fraud", "419 Fraud" (Four-One-Nine) after
the relevant section of the Criminal Code of Nigeria, and "The Nigerian
Connection" (mostly in Europe). However, it is usually called plain old
"419" even by the Nigerians themselves."
It is a little intimidating to think about tracking spam from organized
crime rings that are known to engage in the occasional kidnapping and
murder. Still, the most notable thing that came out of the incidents is
that unlike nearly every other spammer I've encountered, the '419' spammers
use non-free anonymizing services (e.g. anonymizer.com, etc) to read the
replies sent to their web mail drop boxes. Must be something about having
the Secret Service hunting them that makes 'em extra cautious.
Joe
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