The most typical scam scheme I could think of are the one's already many times practised in Estonia. Sites like Hinnavaatlus, Kuldne Börs etc offer it's customers to exchange used goods for money. I have witnessed users, who did the following:
Found a product with a good price. By the idea proposed by the seller (to avoid competition) the potential buyer wired a small amount of money to the sellers account. Later they did not receive the product or it was damaged. // This type of fraud has greatly reduced over the years because of the high cooperation by site-owners to catch the scammers in cooperation with the police.
It's hard to describe a perfect scam, because the easy (and first to come to mind) focus on the stupidity of a person - eg send me money so I could send you back some more. Or they stress out a person in need (help us help a child in Valgamaa, who can't walk).
Probably it would be dumb to describe a perfect scam, because then it would be put to use (if I would be interested, I would do it myself).
In conclusion, the most effective scams will always be the one's hoping for a ill-IT-literate (n00b) user to send the scammer voluntarily some money.
There is one exception - phishing sites. With the ease of reproduction almost no website in the world is piracy proof and I do fear that some day, when typing in eg. emay.com I would get the exact-looking website, buy my product there and find out, that thanks to one spell error I know am 100 dollars poorer.
Of course HTTPS etc helps, but nothing is unbreakable. Except diamonds? But you don't put times and PC together.
Review of Scam o Rama & What's the bloody points
I read couple of scam introductions in both sites. Since they are VERY long, I took the liberty not to read the majority of them. My first question was - how do they have time to re-scam the scammers? The discussions were very long and as I could understand the Nigerians (who live in Africa, where life is gloomy), I still have great trouble understanding how a person (EU, US) can have such time to deal with them.
From the ethical side of view I see no troubles. As the main idea is to let the Nigerians "have a taste of their own medicine" and no real harm (nobody has sent the rescammers money) is being done, then it is a form of people's project (Teeme Ära etc). Although the goal is questionable since there would be no greater outcome of the project.
Well - actually there is one outcome. The sites provide an exxeceltn study material on scams and hopefully will teach future maybe-victims what to expect from a scammer.
I myself just never read e-mail not sent from my contacts.
