X-Industry

Ever think about scamming the harassing telephone scammers?  Three to four days a week, a US Los Angeles based voice actor calls back telephones thieves and messes with their heads.  For the past two years, this champion of anti-scamming, runs a sort of reverse call center, deliberately ringing the people most of us hang up on those scammers who pose as tax agencies or tech-support companies or inform you that you’ve recently been in a car accident you somehow do not recall.  When the actor gets a scammer on the line, she will pretend to be an old lady, or a six-year-old girl, or do an uncanny impression of Apple’s virtual assistant Siri. Once, she successfully fooled a fake customer service representative into believing that she was Britney Spears. “I waste their time,” she explains, “and now they’re not stealing from someone’s grandma.” 

This anti-scammer warrior is a “scambaiter,” a type of vigilante who disrupts, exposes or even scams the world’s scammers.  While scambaiting has a troubled 20-year online history, with early forum users employing extreme, often racist, humiliation tactics, a new breed of scambaiters are taking over TikTok and YouTube.  The warrior has more than 1.5 million followers across both video platforms, where she likes to keep things “funny and light.”[1] 

Last April in the UK, a then junior health minister Tweeted about a “massive sudden increase” in spam calls, while a month earlier the consumer group ‘Which?’ found that phone and text fraud was up 83% during the Corona pandemic.  In this environment, scambaiters are truly superheroes.  What motivates people like these anti-scammer warriors?  Is this helpful is their vigilantism?  And has a scambaiter ever made a scammer have a change of heart?  Adam West became Batman to avenge the death of his parents; this warrior became a scambaiter after her mom was scammed out of $500.  In her 60s and living alone, her mother saw a strange pop-up on her computer one day in 2019.  It was emblazoned with the Windows logo and said she had a virus; there was also a number to call to get the virus removed.  “And so, she called and they told her, ‘You’ve got this virus, why don’t we connect to your computer and have a look.” Her mother granted the scammer remote access to her computer, meaning they could see all of her files.  She paid them $500 to “remove the virus” and they also stole personal details, including her social security number.

Thankfully, the bank was able to stop the money leaving her mother’s account, but her daughter wanted more than just a refund.  She asked her mom to give her the number she’d called and called it herself, spending an hour and 45 minutes wasting the scammer’s time.  “My computer’s giving me the worst vibes,” she began in a Kim Kardashian’s voice. “Are you in front of your computer right now?” asked the scammer.  “Yeah, well it’s in front of me, is that… that’s like the same thing?” The anti-warrior then put a video she made of the call on YouTube and since then has made over 200 more videos, through which she earns regular advertising revenue (she also takes sponsorships directly from companies).

“A lot of it is entertainment – it’s funny, it’s fun to do, it makes people happy,” she says when asked why she scambaits.  “But I also get a few emails a day saying, ‘Oh, thank you so much, if it weren’t for that video, I would’ve lost $1,500.’”  She is not naïve as she knows she can’t stop people scamming, but she hopes to stop people falling for scams.  “I think just educating people and preventing it from happening in the first place is easier than trying to get all the scammers put in jail.”

Some scambaiters do report scammers to the police as part of their operation, as with an anti-scammer warrior in Ireland.  His alias name is ‘Jim Browning’ and became a ‘YouTuber’ with nearly 3.5 million subscribers.  He has been posting scambaiting videos for the past seven years.  Browning regularly gets access to scammers’ computers and has even managed to hack into the CCTV footage of call centers in order to identify individuals.  He then passes this information to the “relevant authorities” including the police, money-processing firms and Internet service providers.  “I wouldn’t call myself a vigilante, but I do enough to say, ‘This is who is running the scam,’ and I pass it on to the right authorities.”  He adds that there have only been two instances where he’s seen a scammer get arrested.  Earlier this year, Browning worked with BBC’s Panorama to investigate an Indian call center, which resulted in the center being raided by local police and the owner was taken into custody.

Browning says becoming a YouTuber was “accidental.  He originally started uploading his footage so he could send links to the authorities as evidence, but then viewers came flooding in.  “Unfortunately, YouTube tends to attract a younger audience and the people I’d really love to see looking at videos would be older folks,” he says.  As only 10% of Browning’s audience are over 60, he collaborates with the American Association of Retired People (AARP) to raise awareness of scams in its official magazine.  “I deliberately work with them so I can get the message a little bit further afield.”

‘Edward’ is a US based software engineer who engaged in an infamous bait on the world’s largest scambaiting forum in the early 2000s.  Together with some online friends, Edward managed to convince a scammer named ‘Omar’ that he had been offered a lucrative job.  Omar paid for a 600-mile flight to Lagos only to end up stranded.  “He was calling us because he had no money.  He had no idea how to get back home.  He was crying,” Edward explains. “And I mean, I don’t know if I believe him or not, but that was the one where I was like, ‘Ah, maybe I’m taking things a little too far.’” Edward stopped scambaiting after that – he’d taken it up when stationed in a remote location while in the military.  He describes spending four or five hours a day scambaiting: it was a “part-time job” that gave him “a sense of community and friendship.  I mean, there’s a reason I asked to remain anonymous, right?”  Edward says when asked about his actions now. “I’m kind of embarrassed for myself. There’s a moment where it’s like, ‘Oh, was I being the bad guy?’” Now, Edward doesn’t approve of vigilantism and says the onus is on tech platforms to root out scams.

While the public continues to feel powerless in the face of increasingly sophisticated scams (this summer, Browning himself fell for an email scam which resulted in his YouTube channel being temporarily deleted), but scambaiting likely is not going anywhere.  A Canadian anti-scammer warrior, from Ontario Canada, began scambaiting during the first lockdown in 2020.  Since then, one of her TikTok videos has been viewed 1.5m times.  She has told scammers her name is ‘Nancy Drew,’ given them the address of a police station when asked for her personal details, and repeatedly played dumb to frustrate them.

“I believe the police and tech companies need to do more to prevent and stop these scams, but I understand it’s difficult,” says the Canadian, who argues that the authorities and scambaiters should work together.  She hopes her videos will encourage young people to talk to their grandparents about the tactics scammers use and, like Browning, has received grateful emails from potential victims who have avoided scams thanks to her content.  “My videos are making a small but important difference out there,” she says. “As long as they call me, I’ll keep answering.”

Red Sky Alliance is a Cyber Threat Analysis and Intelligence Service organization that offers cyber threat services that include RedXray and Cyber Threat Analysis Center (CTAC) to aid organizations for cyber threat hunting, notifications, and analysis.  Service descriptions can be found at https://www.wapacklabs.com.   For questions, comments or assistance, please contact the office directly at 1-844-492-7225, or feedback@wapacklabs.com

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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/03/who-scams-the-scammers-meet-the-amateur-scambaiters-taking-on-the-crooks?utm_source=pocket-newtab