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Unsung guardians watch over the Web

"Everyone has obsessions of some type, but this is out of hand."

"Eddie", an Internet vigilante from Florida

Peter, a financial adviser living in the UK, was taken aback when he got a gruff, no-nonsense call on his mobile last week. The voice at the other end told him not to send ?7,300 to Spain.

"I still don't know how he found me," said Peter, who had been thinking about buying a cheap Porsche Boxster that he'd seen in a paper. The seller had asked him to send the money to an escrow company and pointed him to its Web site. When it received the money and the car, the seller said, the trade would be made and the car would be released for shipment.

What Peter didn't know was that the escrow company's Web site had been identified as a fake by a scam-watching group. If he had made the trade, he would probably never have seen car or cash again.

"I was certainly interested in sending the money because I wanted the car, and he definitely knocked that on the head for me," said Peter.

He was already suspicious about the car's seller, but was wavering until he got the call.

"After speaking to him, I made my mind up that I wasn't going to send any money," he said.

The call came from Eddie, an Internet vigilante living in Florida who found Peter's details after infiltrating the seller's computer. Eddie has saved people thousands of dollars over the past five years. Eddie is one of the digilanti -- an Internet user who prefers to keep a low profile but works without recompense to make the Web a better place.

Eddie's days are always the same. When he gets home from work around noon, he lets his dogs out, then boots an ageing computer and gets to work. His speciality is tracking down escrow scammers and their victims.

He began investigating Internet scammers after being scammed himself a few years ago -- he tried to buy a digital camera via eBay and sent money to the seller via Western Union. The seller, and the cash, disappeared.

"I found all of these fraudulent auctions on eBay," he recalled.

Then someone approached him from the site's escrow and insurance message boards.

"When I saw what was going on with the escrow sites, I figured this was where my heart lay," he said.

He began nosing around the Internet, and before long was gaining access to lists of potential victims. For the first few years, he'd call them directly and try to warn them that they were being duped. Some people listened, but some either hung up on him or, against his advice, contacted the scammers, hoping Eddie was wrong. That would alert the scammers, who would rush to protect their systems.

"I stopped warning people when I got frustrated because it doesn't do any good," he said.

These days, phone calls to potential victims such as Peter are rare. Instead, he concentrates on logging information about scam Web sites and feeding it to security contacts that he hopes might be able to help. He also contacts the ISPs that are used to host scam sites registered with stolen credit cards, but mostly finds them unresponsive.

This online detective work is his life. Most of his free time is spent in front of his PC.

"Everyone has obsessions of some type, but this is out of hand," he said. "I worry that if I stop, I'll lose track and I'll never be able to maintain what I'm doing now, at this depth."

But while his online activities grow, his real life has suffered and his friendships have withered.

"I'm in my 50s and most guys my age are married," he lamented.

Like Eddie, David Hart feels compelled to do what he does, but it also occupies time that would otherwise go wasted.

"If bullets were cold, I'd be dead," said Hart, who was disabled in a 2004 murder attempt.

The bullet entered his back and lodged in his leg, rupturing his femoral artery. He is only alive because the heat of the bullet cauterized the wound.

Now he runs TQM3, a real-time spam blacklist that gathers IP addresses being used as sources of spam or botnet traffic.

"There is not a nickel of revenue," he said. "I spend eight hours a day on a non-commercial endeavor that costs money out of my own pocket."

"My house is a mess. I'm a mess, but I feel compelled to do this," he said, adding that he feels as if he has been guided by God. "I asked, `God, please give me some strength. Give me something to occupy my mind.'"
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