How would you punish the scammers?

Thankfully, in reality a judge would not have the ability to give any form of punishment they wanted. My own intuitions would tell me that scammer 1 should be given a relatively lenient punishment but still enough to deter him from scamming again. If I believed him that he was coerced then I might consider letting him go free in return for providing evidence on the relative who seems to be running the scam operation. And if possible he would have to return all of his victims' money. Scammers 2 and 3 should probably both get a prison sentence, but scammer 3 should get longer because of the aggravating factors of stealing larger sums of money and using the romance scam format. I don't believe he can be held legally responsible for the suicide unless he had reason to expect that his victim would do this. His remorse would make no difference to me. That said, if I really were a judge then I would have to follow the guidelines given to me by the law and I would try to be as impartial as possible.

In my opinion, scambaiting is not about bringing justice to scammers; to me, it is more about engineering circumstances so that a scammer's attempts to scam a victim turn out to harm nobody but the scammer himself. For this reason, my different responses to how the scammers should be punished do not mean that I would want to persuade the scammers to do different things when baiting them. I would be just as satisfied with any of them being sent on safari, for example.

The cat or the birch, if the machine was available.