I'm kind of blown away that you remember my adventures in Nigeria. That was almost ten years ago!

Did you read the comments? There was a self-referential irony: Quite a few people were so clueless they thought the solution was simply to block email from Nigeria...and one guy who billed himself as head of an anti-fraud group sounded more like an agitator egging them on. Maybe a scammer himself?

Anyway, got me to thinking about doing it again. And maybe this time more focused on developing, eventually, an automated (Eliza-grade "AI") honey pot for pinning down AFF scammers ("honey pot": see Winnie the Pooh).

My approach then was to continually send false identity clues, both explicit in the email, and contextual, like the "victim's" own Web site and a random real estate listing establishing residence. Veracity and plausibility are everything in that game.

These scammers are uniquely vulnerable to this kind of thing, because, as the article points out, they don't try that hard, and expect their victims to be stupid. Once you get inside their filter, you're "proven" stupid and they're not on guard as much. Scammers project weak false identity signals and can be snowed by strong false identity information.

One scammer is about all one person can handle in a mano-a-mano duel. To pin down a lot of scammers will require a team effort. You'd probably want each conversation carried on by one individual for consistency, conversations distributed among the team; and everybody provides support in building up backstories and creating "pocket lint".

Over time you'd build a library of that material, including the conversations themselves, which can be mined for trigger keywords paired with standard responses. That's necessary to achieve the WSJ's goal of an automated honey pot system. I don't see how you could start out cold designing such a thing from scratch. Better to observe reality and build automated assists over time ("press F6 to request a photo holding a sign").

That'd be fun, wouldn't it? Sounds like the sort of thing that might appeal to Zoners, especially at a time when the alternative is arid partisan politics. We already have the facility for the first part, it'd be a matter of getting organized.