Aa419:About

Welcome to artists against 419

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

In October 2003 the Artist Against 419 started tackling fake banks in an artistic way: by hotlinking images to drain their small bandwidth quota 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, and we started cooperaing with webhosting companies to get the 419 sites shut down as soon as possible without causing harm to the webhosters.

Today, the Artists maintain 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 watching you...