Besides, if something is illegal and there's a significant portion of offenders who are truly ignorant of its illegality, perhaps a new approach to education is needed, which this tactic also covers.
Maybe other organizations will take notes...
Education
> Big Pipes’ Allison Nixon says she hopes that softer tactics like those can intercept would-be booter service operators early, before they start committing felonies: She’s found that most booter operators start as customers before launching their own service. But for people who aren’t dissuaded by those interventions, she says, Big Pipes and its partners at the FBI will still be watching them.
> “The hope is that this whole show of force will convince some of them to quit and get a real job,” Nixon says. “We want to send a message that there are people tracking you. There are people paying attention to you. We have our eyes on you, we might get you next. And it might not even be on Christmas.”
So the honeypots sound like a sort of catch-and-release strategy to scare kids before they start their own DDoS enterprises.
The FBI would be indicting them, not just warning them -- go to all that trouble of setting up a fake site, and then you just give up actually indicting them for their crime? What's even the point of that? That they didn't know it was a fake site is no defense, the FBI routinely, say, sells people fake bombs and then indicts them.