“Scam baiting is a form of Internet vigilantism in which the vigilante poses as a potential victim to a scammer in order to waste their time and resources, gather information that will be of use to authorities, and publicly expose the scammer. It is, in essence, a form of social engineering that may have an altruistic motive or may be motivated by malice. Primarily used to thwart advance-fee fraud scams, scam baiting can be conducted out of a sense of civic duty, as a form of amusement, or both. […]

The phenomenon can be understood as a kind of cross-cultural double-bluff in which agents on separate continents wrestle with and try to out-do each other in an online tug-of-war for one’s financial gain or the other’s time and resources. As a past time, scam baiting has flourished with the global spread of email and the internet to Africa, South America and the Far East. In the brief history of the genre, one of the most notorious scam baits took place in January and February 2006 between scam baiter Arthur Dent BSc, HHGTTG, PhD (who shares the same name as the main protagonist of the Hitch-hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy) and two scammers claiming to be Barrister Musa Issah and Mrs. Joyce Ozioma, both from Nigeria” (Mishka Henner, “Epilogue”).

It is precisely this case that Mishka Henner’s book documents. The book begins with the email correspondence that ensues when the scambaiter responds to an email from the scammers and, in return, offers them cooperation in a research project for which he is collecting handwriting samples from all around the world that will be remunerated with $100 per page. The scammers accept this offer. This is followed by scans of the 293 samples sent in, each from a different hand, which reproduce the entire second volume of J.K. Rowling’s series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in beautiful handwriting. This is again succeeded by emails in which the scammers demand their fee, which the scambaiter, however, refuses for obscure reasons. An epilogue by Henner, who sees the shady scam business as a metaphor for our internet culture, concludes the book.

Henner has reduced the promotion of and information about this book because J.K. Rowling is known for her litigiousness in copyright issues.