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Welcome to Artists Against 419

The The Valentine's Day Flash Mob is over! Artists Against 419 and their supporters have bandwidth hogged 26 Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud fake banks to their miserable death on 13 and 14 February, 2006. Click here for the list of the results.

Read more about the past Flashmobs!

Announcement: New home for 419legal.org

The home of the former joint venture between the Johannesburg Commercial Branch anti-419 team and certain members of the world scambaiting community, 419legal.org, has been moved to a new domain: http://419legal.ath.cx. Please note that for reasons described on the front page of the new site, the project has been terminated and the new domain will only made available for the public for documentation purposes.

Announcement: request from the Metropolitan Police (UK)

Please forward all your incoming 419 and advanced fee fraud emails to the Metropolitan Police along with full email headers to fraud.alert@met.police.uk.

This request is obviously not limited to those living in the UK for the simple reason that UK based perpetrators of this crime indiscriminately distribute their scam letters to email addresses all over the world.

In the event that you fail to include the full headers, the information is as helpful as phoning the fire-brigade and telling them that there is a fire, but failing to tell them where it is. If you cannot find the full headers, please just bin your e-mail and do not forward it as it will merely irritate busy police officers and is a total waste of your and their time.

Please refer to the documentation of your email client on how to turn on full email headers before forwarding your emails. (Yahoo users should click on "Options", "General Preferences", and at the option "Forwarding Messages" set "Forward as an attachment".) Users of other email programmes may find this page useful, but be prepared to copy and paste if your programme will not include them automatically.

The Artists Against 419 greatly appreciate the efforts of the Metropolitan Police in taking action against the perpetrators of the Nigerian scam and offer full cooperation.

Spread the word!

A new bandwidth tool has been released for beta testing on 13 February 2006: Muguito is a Java tool that runs equally under Windows, Linux, Mac, or any other OS that supports Java. Current version is 0.1.5a, released on April 26, 2006. It is stable, fast, precise -- and deadly to fake banks.

The Artists revealed an updated version of the Lad Vampire on December 5. Take a look, and read more about it in our forums!

Artists Database Used in New Firetrust Sitehound Software

That's right, the Artists are one of the Community Groups whose information is used by Firetrust's recently released toolbar. Of course we are very pleased that years of hard work in putting together our database are being put to some greater use! But most importantly, there's now a way for thousands of internet users to be immediately warned that they're being targeted by scammers. Nothing fights 419 fraud like public awareness!!!

Manifesto

Artists love the internet - with the exception of spam! There is only one thing that we hate more than spammers: 419 scammers abusing the internet... These criminals abuse our mailboxes by sending 419 emails, they abuse our guest books by leaving their MUGU entries and they abuse this media by building web sites for criminal fake companies. But some people started hitting back....

In October 2003 the Artist Against 419 started tackling fake banks in an artistic way: by hotlinking their images to drain their small bandwidth allowance over the limit. But the fake banks evolved and so did the Artists. On the 30th of November 2003 the Artists Against 419 hosted the |first international flashmob against 419 which would have many successors. We also started maintaining a list of the 419 related sites we found so that potential scam victims would see our website and be warned when they searched for their online banks, and we started cooperaing with webhosting companies to get the 419 sites shut down as soon as possible without causing harm to the webhosters.

At the moment, the Artists maintain one of the world's largest databases of 419 websites. We offer a public interface for our site visitors, as well as a database access through webservices which can be used by people for automated retrieval of fake bank entries. We continue to build better relations with webhosting companies and rid the web of fraudulent websites.

Fake bankers beware! The artists are coming.... Everybody is an artist!

Related pages

• FAQ and Support
• What is 419?
• Is this a legit site? Online search tools to help identify fraud
• Links to other sites
• Fanmail
• Fake banks and Web sites in the news
• Old Coaster's List of Bank Regulators around the World

Bandwidth Attack Information

• What is the Flash Mob?
• Flash Mob History
• Why Bandwidth Theft?
• Bandwidth Results
• AA419 Tools
• Bandwidth Scripts

Please see the User's Guide for usage and configuration help. This guide here is a good summary about formatting, tips and tricks, etc.