As promised, here is a quick guide on how to have so many 419 scammers messaging you that you won’t even know what to do with them all, think atomic shrimp vibes. the beauty of this is its a really low effort bait and there is so many that you can just sorta try whatever you want and if you ruin the scambait just move onto the next one. I’m going to break this into sections based on platform.
This is possibly the easiest way to find these scammers, I just don’t use it too much as I generally hate the email vibes and prefer instant messaging platforms.
All you need to do is make a spare email address (I’ve used gmail and yahoo for this personally but literally anything works) and then you go put up a post on muguguestbook.com and wait. My understanding is that mugu guestbook is a place dedicated for scambaiters (you’ll see why if you use it), and if you go to https://muguguestbook.com/mugu.txt you can see all the emails are laid out in a nice format for the scammers to just copy paste into their email client. Fun fact mugu is Nigerian slang for stupid/idiot.
Once you put your email into mugu guestbook you just have to give it time. Shouldn’t take more than a week to pick up, sometimes as little as 24h. My only reminder is most of these emails get sent to the spam folder so make sure to check your spam folder
Telegram
Telegram is an absolute hotbed of scammers, its basically an unmoderated platform lol. The hardest part of this is you
- need a phone to create an account
– Once the account is generated it seems you can pair it to a desktop app and sign out from mobile and it still functions, I did that to help my friend who doesn’t want to install telegram on his phone but he installed the app in a vm - need a phone number to create account
- have to go join some rooms and build a (teensy) presence, it isn’t effortless like the email one is
Basically what you have to do is generate a telegram account, then what I’ve found success with is joining a bunch of conspiracy theory channels such as https://t.me/lostmountain https://t.me/ExposeAgenda and https://t.me/TheTrueDefenderthen on mobile you can go in the details section (tap top right) and select the “discuss” and send a few messages in the chat
It also seems to help if you join the yahoo boys chat and dm the scammers in there (they don’t seem to notice that your mutual chat is the yahoo boys chat) https://t.me/Lagosajah
I also have a group chat bridged to matrix where I force scammers in and harass them, and my alts that hang out in there seem to get a lot of dms from scammers too. https://t.me/jessicaallengroup (#chaos:matrix.org on the matrix side but not much dms there, and fyi the group name is making fun of all the scammers that call themselves Jessica Allen)
I have a matrix bot that collects investment scams linking to telegram and whatsapp, from many rooms on matrix. #jjj-tg-scams:matrix.org if you’re on matrix, or view.matrix.org if you’re not (loads in a web browser)
Warning if you’re using your real number for telegram, make sure to set it to be hidden for everyone including contacts in the privacy settings so you don’t accidentally give the scammer your phone number if you add them to contacts
Okay so this isn’t one you can do on it’s own, it is only really effective when combined with one of the two above methods. Reminder to use a number dedicated to scambaiting as you will get lots of insistent scammers, and you wanna separate that from your real number. If you already use whatsapp with your personal number you can download whatsapp business and set it up with a second number. This is what all the scammers do lol.
One of the more obvious routes is that if you’re like me and hate email, you can just reply to all the emails with Please contact me on whatsapp at _ and since they almost always have whatsapp that will work. If you want you might be able to recruit someone else to do the email part of that for you, I guess you could post your scambaiting whatsapp number here if you want to try that. (You could also try this with telegram I suppose, its just not as widespread as them having a whatsapp, and I usually prefer doing over whatsapp because it means I get their phone number.
The other way, is to combine this with telegram. If you make your telegram and whatsapp under the same number you can then make your phone number public to everyone (in privacy settings) and then relationship and sextortion scammers will occasionally dm you on whatsapp. If you are going to do this I recomend google voice since most other voip numbers are either banned from Telegram, whatsapp, or both, but I have had good luck using google voice to do this. I have had the second most luck with talkatone if you are willing to install that on your phone since it doesnt have a pc/web version
if it seems like I missed anything please let me know below, and I’ll edit it in. Hopefully this helps!
Just thought I would also add in that something I do when I’m fed up with scammers is I collect the whatsapp numbers that some of them give me in their emails and then I tell other scammers to contact me on that whatsapp number. I don’t get to watch it implode usually but sometimes I just know the other is getting call spammed when they email me back like “you’re not picking up the phone”
