419 Scams - Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud
Detection, Education, Eradication

Since the dawn of the internet, criminals have explored the use of technology to further their illegal activities. In order to stem the tide of 419 (Nigerian Advanced Fee Fraud Scams) and other such illegal activities, Law Enforcement agencies, while cooperating internationally, must also progress in their knowledge and use of technologies capable of tracking these individuals and obtaining evidence for arrests, prosecutions and convictions while retaining the rights of those individuals.

It is .NExT Web Security's position that such surveillance can and is currently being performed using totally legal methodologies and technologies, without the use of eavesdropping or software installed on the criminal's machine. However such software and tracking does play a valuable role in detection and prosecution of e-Scammers.

While email spam continues to be an issue, its impact has been drastically curtailed by the use of spam filters for email clients. These filters detect both actual spam as well as judging the probability that a particular email is spam and labeling it as such. The 419buster™ application uses similar algorithms to ascertain the probability of both scam email harvesting as well as actual points of origination of scams.

The technological tools presented here represent some of the functionality of the 419buster application to be used by both Law Enforcement and Anti-scam Specialists to further their investigations.