Artists Against 419 - History

History

The site was set up in October 2003 and began tackling fake banks in an artistic way: by hotlinking their images to drain their small bandwidth allowance over their monthly limit. Over time the fake banks evolved and so have the Artists. On November 30, 2003, the Artists Against 419 hosted its first international flash-mobsee below. There have been many subsequent mobbings designed to make hosters aware that the Artists Against 419 will not tolerate hosters knowingly hosting websites that AA419 deems criminal.

At the same time, they started to list the allegedly fraudulent sites that members had found, so that potential scam victims would see their website and be warned when looking for the sites to which the scammers direct them. This list now contains more than 31,000 websites (as of November 24, 2008), and is one of the world's largest databases of fraudulent websites.

Sophisticated tools are used to search for fake sites. Once a site is proved to be fake, it is entered into the database, and the hoster is contacted with the evidence and asked to close down the fraudulent site. Frequently, fake sites are closed within days of being set up. As great care is taken to check each site before it is listed, the AA419 website is increasingly used by law enforcement agencies as a source of information. The UK Metropolitan Police force is reported to work with AA419.

AA419 has good relations with many webhosting companies who themselves have no wish to host dishonest sites and cooperate willingly by closing down the fake sites once the evidence is presented. However, a few companies fail to respond to AA419's evidence, and in such circumstances they arrange a virtual sit-in.