The scam-baiters seem almost like a spontaneous evolutionary response to a threatening predatory species— think of them as the T cells of the Internet’s immune system. But they can also seem an embodiment of the devolution of discourse and increase in abuse and invective that’s come to be known as “cyber-disinhibition”—the tendency of people to engage in hostile interactions when they aren’t inhibited by face-to-face contact.

Are the scam-baiters Jedi-like cyber-guardians taking up arms against the Web’s Dark Side, Spam-scam, or are they cyber-vigilantes engaging in vicious pranks that can, at times, border on racism?

On first entering the scam-baiting Web sites, one picks up the good-natured vibe of the elaborate fake bookie joints in movies such as The Sting—the hum and buzz of counter-con artists taking pleasure in the game. The chatter ranges from the relatively innocent-sounding “nov 7. i got somebody for the first time,” with a transcript of a scam-bait string, to the more triumphalist “650 mile safari and longest insult EVER!”

“Safaris” are the trips scam-baiters lure scammers into making to remote banks to collect their advance fees, which, of course, don’t exist. Insults, the bitter imprecations hurled at the scam-baiter once the scammer realizes he’s been scammed, are prized as tokens of the baiter’s success in “owning” the scammer—driving him around the bend and provoking him to the spluttering rage of capital-letter curses: “YOU ARE GOING STUPID, ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? YOU FOOLISH WHITE MONKEY AND YELLOW PIG” was the response of one “barrister” when finally copping to his humiliation. But the most valuable “trophies” are photos of scammers holding ridiculously worded signs—such as King of Retards or I am a sheep shagger—whose significance they apparently don’t recognize.

I started paying closer attention to the world of 419 scams after a phone call from a woman I know. She nervously reported that out of curiosity she’d played along with a Nigerian scam, and had just gotten an e-mail from someone called “The Professor” telling her that “diplomats” were on their way to her apartment with “documents to sign.” I advised her to e-mail the Professor and tell him she’d called the police and the FBI. The diplomats never showed up.

Still, I’d never known anyone who’d gotten in that deep—though I’d certainly seen reports of the surprising success scammers have had with otherwise intelligent pillars of society, including a former congressman who’d served on the House committee weighing Nixon’s impeachment for dirty tricks. My friend told me that she hadn’t lost any funds thus far, because she’d given them the number of a bank account with no money in it—which she realized wasn’t exactly sufficient precaution.

I was fascinated to learn that she’d actually had a phone conversation with the Professor, a shadowy figure who shows up in a number of scam e-mails and whom I imagined as a kind of cyber-Moriarty—or perhaps a cyber-Virgil leading the unwary down into the lower circles of cyber-scam hell. As I began paying more attention to cyber-scam letters—to the subtle shifts in the pitch of the messages, to the tonal and rhetorical tropes—I began thinking of the vast body of these letters as a kind of literary genre.