Turns out there’s an entire Web subculture devoted to messing with the Nigerian investment fund scammers’ heads, just for fun. ‘419,’ as a shorthand term to describe this kind of fraud, originally came from the relevant section of the Nigerian penal code (not very consistently enforced, it would seem), not the FBI as I wrote earlier.
Much the best and funniest site here: 419eater.com
See also
419sport
419game
Artists Against 419
Scam-O-Rama
419game’s author explains the appeal:
It turns the tables on the scammers. They send literally thousands of emails out at a time: many are to non-existent addresses and so "bounce"; of those that reach a valid mailbox, most are ignored; out of that small percentage which land in the mailbox of someone gullible enough to believe that there really is someone out there who wants to give them ten or twenty million dollars, the scammer is hoping that just a few are too greedy to pass up the opportunity and end up being sucked into the trap. If everyone who receives an approach like this engages the scammer in a protracted exchange of time-wasting emails, his productivity will be reduced dramatically, and fewer people will end up losing their hard-earned money.