
Ask HN: Using shock images like Goatse to fight online scammers - burtonator
Scammers are becoming more and more a problem for me... fake CL house rentals, people asking for banking information, etc.<p>The problem is that, for the most part, there&#x27;s no way to retaliate.<p>So I was thinking of doing an easy reverse fishing attack.<p>Basically you reply with:<p>&quot;Sure, here&#x27;s my banking info https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chasebankint.com&#x2F;1xv94&quot;<p>this URL SEEMS like a fake banking site but when you load it download a shock image, audio, locally, and then display these to the user.<p>A shock image is an image that&#x27;s VERY disgusting and can basically borderline cause brain damage. Not literally of course but you can NOT unsee these things.  They&#x27;re VERY VERY NSFL....<p>The audio could be various things like audio from pornography or a message scolding them, etc.<p>There are also various ways to lock up the browser to KEEP them on the site.<p>The upside here is that this could be used against scammers.<p>But it would also be weaponizing an attack and commoditizing it so that it can be used against regular&#x2F;innocent people.<p>I was thinking that one way to avoid this would be to require the user to make a payment, validate their information against a card, and they can later receive a refund if they like (maybe keeping a portion for charity or to fight online scammers).<p>Thoughts?
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gradschool
My first thought is that youtube and facebook content reviewers get paid for
being exposed to the worst aspects of human nature, albeit not nearly enough.
Why should you do it for free? In any case, a low-effort method is to save
your ransomware emails and use the attachments on them in your subsequent
replies to scammers.

I'm not convinced that locking a browser to keep it on a site is feasible, so
maybe my skepticism will be of some use if it motivates you to prove me wrong.
I'm confused by your last paragraph, but email services to which senders pay a
refundable deposit are not a new idea.

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heartbeats
It is pointless. They are most likely hardened fellows who will not respond to
it with much of a reaction.

If you want to accomplish something, try to decrease their profitability. For
example, write a bot that responds to scam emails, tries to get them off
script, and spend a lot of their time.

If 90% of their time is spent on your bots, that's profits down by 90%. If
they have a profit margin of 50%, then they will be making a loss with your
actions.

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planetzero
I used to answer spam emails and include a word document with all of my
'information'.

The word document contained various photos of shit in the toilet with the
occasional goatse thrown in.

The scammer would get so angry and always send me a response.

It always made me laugh.

