Nigerian spam

I just came across this Slashdot post. Besides going into more detail than its parent on the subject of giving fake data to phishing sites, it suggests a rather ingenius scheme to shut down 419/advance fee fraud (often Nigerian) email scams.

Program a mail client plugin to mark these as "419 scam", the way you would mark other mail as "SPAM." The plugin takes over, and proceeds to carry on a threaded discussion with the scammer over the course of days, using a conversational-AI like Eliza. I would suggest a timer, waiting a random amount of time between responses, to make it seem even more realistic; spelling and grammatical errors could be added as well, but not in excess.

Waste enough of their time, and the Nigerian spammers won't be able to actually spam anyone. Make them unable to tell whether the person they're carrying on a conversation with is really a person, and they'll be completely crippled. I like it.