For a while now, Artists Against 419 has been receiving reports of secondary victimization of female victims. Where victims to non-delivery scams (pet, poultry, livestock etc scams) report these scammers and their websites, the scammers are quick to target female victims threatening impersonation, threatening mothers with their families, call them up late at night when they’re drunk, make lewd suggestions etc. On numerous occasions these scammers have then also impersonated the victims, committing further fraud with their idnetities.  Feedback has shown this to be a particular problem with scammers from central Africa, the Cameroon, who now reside in South Africa. Many victims report this to the relevant law enforcement authorities, but this has gone unaddressed.

This cowardly behaviour dare not go unaddressed. The victims do their part, report it to the authorities, yet somehow the authorities do not deem it fit to take these reports seriously. We have also stepped into the breach on a  few occasions.

Yesterday an aspirant female farmer reported being threatened after she wanted to buy some poultry, but ended up getting scammed. Raising poultry is not only a great way to feed your family, but also a way to supplement your income by selling eggs and chickens. An investigation of the relevant website should it to be a template website, one seen many times. Typically the scammers will continuously register domains either via a small South African registrar or a large global registrar. The domain registration details at the South African registrar is anonymized, only showing the country to be ZA. However at the larger global registrar, the county is CM. Yet the websites show all South African contact details. This was no surprise as we’ve been seeing this for a while now in these malicious domains.

The best we can do for the victims is to discourage such future secondary victimization. It’s for this reason that, should any victim report being on the receiving end of such harassment, Artists Against 419 will ensure we send a message to these scammers. We will go out of our way to disrupt and destroy not only the scam responsible, but also all scams associated with the syndicate, their nest(s). Then we’ll choose another non-delivery fraudster syndicate’s websites, then do the same to their infrastructure. This is not vindictive, there was no excuse to have been defrauding to start with.  Perhaps these syndicates can come to an agreement amongst themselves to not target female victims in revenge attacks, learn why is a distinctly bad idea, discourage their members and fellow syndicates in whatever way they deem fit.

We will target the nests of these cowards. The word chicken has been long associated with cowardice.

Operation Chicken Run #1 is in planning stage and will commence next week.

Well done dear brave chicken expats in South Africa who decided it’s a great idea to threaten the mothers with their families in your guest country.