London, March 15:

An army of ‘digilanti’ - unpaid loners at their PCs - are trying to keep the web free of spam and scammers.

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 GBP17,300 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 website. When it received the money and the car, the seller said, the trade would be made and the car would be released for shipment.

Watching the scammers: What Peter didn’t know was that the escrow company’s website 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 interested in sending the money because I wanted the car, and he definitely knocked that on the head for me,” says Peter. He was already suspicious about the car’s seller, but was wavering. “After speaking to him, I made my mind up that I wasn’t going to send any money.”