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Ever wondered what it would be like to take the law into your own hands? We're not suggesting that you start chasing criminals. But there is one small area in which ordinary citizens are taking on the fight for justice. Known as scam-baiters, these people have decided to turn the tables on internet scammers. They might not be able to stop the scams, but scam-baiters hope to reduce the number of victims by forcing scammers to waste time and resources. They also try to alert victims by tracking down those who are being hooked in by a scam before they lose their money - or worse.

Incredible as it may seem, a good scam-baiter can even get a scammer to spend money in the belief that they'll get more cash in return. In fact, it seems that scammers are willing to do just about anything, no matter how daft, in pursuit of your cash - a weakness scam-baiters are only too happy to exploit.

Hook, line and Sinker

Understandably, scam-baiters prefer to keep their identities secret. One scam-baiter, who calls herself Bustedup Cowgirl, started scam-baiting after being targeted by 'excess money' scammers when she sold a horse online. Years later, she still gets emails from this sort of scammer. The excess money scam is where a buyer asks the seller to take a cheque, money order or banker's draft for a sum far in excess of the money owed for the item being sold. The victim is then asked to send the excess money to the scammer, who hopes they'll do this before they find out that the payment was counterfeit. Bustedup Cowgirl explained why she does it. "It costs these guys real

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money to send you their fake money orders. And that's money they have successfully scammed off of other unsuspecting people. So I decided to scam the scammer."

Mike runs one of the biggest scam-baiting websites, 419eater.com, which has just celebrated its fourth birthday. His book about scam-baiting, Greetings in Jesus Name: The Scambaiter Letters, was published in 2006. Mike would rather we didn't publish his surname - even though it's written on the cover of his book - as he has made a lot of enemies.

"The vast majority of scams we deal with are of the 419 variety," Mike explained. A 419 scam is an advance-fee fraud, where the victim is lured into spending relatively small amounts of money in the hope of receiving a much larger sum. Many advance-fee scams originate in Nigeria, where this is a crime under section 419, chapter 38, of the Nigerian criminal code.

"All we do is respond to emails we get," Mike said. "We don't hunt them down. There's no way of telling who they are from the email. But of the 40,000 emails received so far, about 65 per cent come from West Africa."

Don't be lulled into a false sense of security, though. A scammer may not be thousands of miles away in another hemisphere. Besides Nigeria, other countries that are well known for various types of scams include Holland, Canada and Russia. The Dutch lottery scam has been around for a while, and has even had fun poked at it in TV commercials. An email message tells the victim that they've won the jackpot, even though they don't remember buying a ticket, and for a small administration fee and tax charge the scammer promises to transfer the cash to the victim's account. It isn't necessarily the Dutch lottery you have won - it could be the lottery in any number of countries.

Then there are the fake selling scams, where the scammers sell items they don't actually own. This scam is on the increase. According to Mike, "a large proportion [of fake selling scams] are coming from Canada". The targets tend to be businesses, and many of these scams are confined to North America. That's no reason to let your guard down, though, as the internet allows profitable scams to spread quickly.