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IANAL: This is what I expect the relevant text in the CFAA is... knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
Is it a protected computer?
As much as I think things like this can be fun, depending on your jurisdiction (and tbh the US loves extraditing people for silly computer crimes), it might not be advisable. This is all but certainly illegal at least within the US. I’m sure most competent security experts have been tempted to do things like this, or SQLi a scammer’s form and nuke their DB, and usually bad things won’t happen to you, you might find t…
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While it may be technically illegal, considering the victims are themselves worse criminals caught in the act, I really doubt anyone is going to give you trouble over this. Unless authorities are looking for an excuse to prosecute you, of course, but there's plenty of bad PR to be had for authorities acting on behalf of criminals trying to steal people's banking credentials.
> While it may be technically illegal, considering the victims are themselves worse criminals caught in the act, I really doubt anyone is going to give you trouble over this. Depends on who you fear more: law enforcement or organized crime.
Defending our democratic institutions > messing with scammers
A friend of mine fell victim to a renting scam here in Czechia. The phishing site was using the native .cz TLD, which is well within the reach of Czech authorities. I was particularly bored that day so I went to a local police department to report a crime. I advised the policeman to take down the phishing site - it was actively facilitating a crime. The poor cops had no idea what to do and in the end they told me tha…
I normally just report those sites on https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/ and it doesn't normally take long to end up with a phishing warning when you navigate to it with a modern browser. I also try to send an email to the registrar "abuse" email to let them know that a specific domain is hosting a phishing page (with the exact link as proof). That takes it down quickly as well, which forces t…
Hilarious story: I was hired to look into why a WordPress site was so slow back in 2010. It turned out the site was hacked and they were hosting a spam viagra site on the side. When I brought it to their attention, the owner asked: "Can we keep it up? It will help our traffic numbers for investors and probably our Google ranking." I literally face-palmed.
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This can be classified as denial of service attack because of the rate your are sending the requests. Depends on the law (and on the interpretation as well). I doubt that the phising guys behind this will file a complaint though.
Many phishing pages reside on compromised domains. Bob's Plumbing Supplies might wonder why their Wordpress site loaded with plug-ins has stopped working, ask someone to take a look, and see your IP address all over the logs.