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Welcome to Artists Against 419

Artists love the internet -- with the exception of scams! Scammers clog our inboxes with emails, spam our guest books and harvest our addresses, and worst of all, abuse this media by creating web sites for fake companies. But in 2003, we started fighting back....

In October 2003, the Artist Against 419 started tackling fake banks in an artistic way: by hotlinking images to drain their small bandwidth allowance over the limit. But the fake banks evolved, and so did the Artists. We 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. We also started asking web hosting companies to take the 419 sites offline to protect the public -- and they did!

The Artists maintain one of the world's largest databases of 419 web sites. We offer a complete public interface for our site visitors, as well as a database access through webservices which can be used for automated retrieval of fake bank entries. Web browser toolbars use our database feed to warn users that a site they visit is a fake company run by scammers. We continue to build better relations with webhosting companies and rid the Internet of fraudulent web sites.

Fake bankers beware! The artists are coming....

Related pages

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 the reasons described on the front page of the new site, the project has been terminated by the admin and moderator team. The new domain is being made available to the public for documentation and research purposes only.

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.

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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!!!

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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 complete 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


Bandwidth Attack Information

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


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