Have you ever gotten an email asking for help transferring money or some other such request involving money? If you have, hopefully you didn't decide to help whoever was asking for it, because most likely, it was a scam. One of the most well known scams is the Nigerian 419 scam, where somebody contacts you about helping them to transfer money in exchange for a portion of the money.
But not everybody dislikes getting these emails, these people are known as Scambaiters. A Scambaiter is somebody who replies to these emails and engages in a (hopefully) long exchange, keeping the scammer just interested enough to keep trying to trick the person. This can sometimes take place over several weeks. The general idea of a Scambaiter is that if they are keeping the scammers busy with their nonsense emails and requests, this keeps real potential victims from being targeted.
It is actually surprising with what a Scambaiter can get away with, as the scammers are ridiculously greedy and will do almost anything to get their victim's cooperation. A common Scambaiter activity is to get the scammer to send a picture of themselves holding a sign with something the Scambaiter picked. Another example includes a Scambaiter getting a scammer to copy the entire book of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" by hand. All 293 pages.
With this advent of new technologies, there are always new dangers to be aware of. Though email scams are certainly not something new, they continue to be a problem, mainly because some people just don't know of the dangers. Scambaiters are trying to raise awareness and help to slow down these dangers.


419 Eater: A website that contains much information about Scambaiting. It also contains exchanges between Scambaiters and scammers, many of which are very funny and worth the read.
(murban)