I trapped scammers in an impossible maze [video](youtube.com) |
I trapped scammers in an impossible maze [video](youtube.com) |
While the idea of wasting the call center operators time appears noble. After watching a few of these scam baiter videos, it appears the call centers are staffed with at least a few dozen people. If one dumb operator stays on the line for 8+ hrs with a scam baiter while the other operators are taking calls from real potential victims. The impact seems limited.
Also, some people will say that it’s educational. But if you look at the target audience of the scammers, it’s mostly the elderly and/or those with dementia or some other progressive mental illness. The education won’t help this vulnerable population.
How do we stop the root of the issue? How do we make it so that scamming the elderly and vulnerable population is not profitable?
For regular folk, who may not have much knowledge about computers and stuff, if they hear "mY nAmE is STevEN" with an Indian accent, tell them to shove it.
This looks like the "scambaiter" actually scammed an artist into making some pretty sweet art under the guise of a scolarship. Am I missing something, or is this actual fraud?
I believe it's origins were going directly after the scammers behind an advance-fee scam, a.k.a. the "Nigerian prince scam". 419 is in reference to some criminal code.
I am slightly skeptical, but kinda hesitantly agreeable, and try to keep them on the phone as long as possible and go through as many levels of their org as possible and mess with the end sales person.
If just 1% of all people did this, I think it would kill telemarketing. AI bots though are starting to make it annoying. I try to get through their screening questions and get to a human, but sometimes it is clear there is no human to reach.
But let's really think about it, isn't it true that most things in the world are some form of a scam?
Growing up in a poor country, I've realized that scams are everywhere, right from the day you start school:
1) Parents resort to scamming the school hiring board using fake addresses just to enroll their children in a good school.
2) In the early years, students learn how to cheat in exams to survive.
3) Teachers unfairly give lower marks to students (or parents) who don't buy into their side hustles like private tutoring or educational CDs.
4) Movies and music are all pirated, contributing to this cycle of deception.
5) Even radio and TV shows shamelessly copy Hollywood productions.
6) Need to get something done at a government office? Be prepared to pay bribes.
7) If you want to leave the country / immigration purposes, you have to navigate a web of bribery and money-grabbing schemes at every level.
8) Far-right racism use pseudo-science to deceive people into thinking that the majority is superior.
9) There are fake diploma and degree providers scamming people within the same country.
10) Interested in day trading? Beware of commission-driven scams and cryptocurrency schemes targeting people from your own country.
11) If you need the government to fix a road, you have to approach politicians and plead for something they promised in the first place.
12) Even small local shops dilute products, potentially selling toxic items to unsuspecting customers.
13) Need water? Attempting to approach politicians is futile. Eventually, the local community took matters into their own hands, establishing a private company to provide water. By the time standard water lines were laid, the locals had already constructed the water tank. (My father played a significant role in this endeavor - the type of person politicians dislike, haha!)
14) As elections draw near, there is a sudden decrease in the prices of goods.
15) Having trouble conceiving? Thinking of consulting the local guru? Don't worry; if your daughter bears a resemblance to the guru, it's all good.
16) A women fell victim to a cryptobro/environmentalist/spiritualist/influencer scammer. Interestingly, this scammers's father is also a con artist who specifically targets older women (he's the old school type). (It's essential to educate your children about pickup artists and red pill nonsense; unfortunately, these tactics sometimes work and are genuinely dangerous.)
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It's no surprise that people resort to scams, likely due to a lack of empathy, extreme cynicism, narcissistic personality disorder, or some combination thereof. Extracting individuals from this mindset requires significant effort.
I initially liked the guy but grew a bit tired of him using what could be veiled racism for views — I’m not accusing him of anything; it just felt cringy-er than I like my YouTube. The ethics are more complicated than that, but something bothered me, especially since that special episode where they sent someone physically there, let pests in the building, etc.
I couldn’t put my finger on why. I didn’t particularly appreciate using animals, but that wasn’t it. I wasn’t a fan of the tall Serbian guy and his friend: they felt like standard prankster YouTubers, and I wouldn't say I like those. It felt like Mark Rober was part of it (He’s my favorite YouTuber, like everyone here) but didn’t like it; he should have been more active but wasn’t… More on MR later. It’s relevant—I promise.
In the meantime, my partner (a medical doctor) has been watching those for a while. She loved it: administrative nightmare, people taking advantage of older people, computer glitches… there was so much schadenfreude to keep her giggling for hours after long shifts. I liked watching over her shoulder, recognizing the episode, and telling her if something good was coming (those are long).
I have this pet theory that some jobs are intensive (you work as much as you do, like clinical work for doctors, plumbers, bakers, or therapists) or extensive (you do things that work for you, like teacher, software developer!). Anyone with an intensive job has a terrible life because they have to work too much in construction. So I’m very tolerant of what you do after a shift to rebuild yourself. (And I think we, the tech community, should turn every job into an extensive one because that’s a better life).
But there still was something that bothered me. It was about how he needed the views to justify his time hacking them, and the views relied on a show that was always the same, and the poor, desperate, upset, and soon openly racist Indian “call center” operator had to be the bad guy. Having the bad guy always have the same skin color didn’t make the viewer any less problematic.
I thought about the theory of Moral luck (some people are in a position where they have to make hard choices, neither option is moral, and judging them for their worst decision without the context is complicated), but it wasn’t it…
I thought about how, after that big bust and the subsequent one, authorities arrested many people. They let most of them go because, of course, the police are deeply in the pocket of the owners that you never see in those videos, who are never really risking much. It felt performative: nothing structural happened. It also felt possibly “culturally racist”: again, good reason to suspect corruption in India, but without evidence, it still felt prejudicial. But obvious.
But then I say this video (the first two minutes, I’m waiting for my partner to come from her shift to watch it together — she’s going to love that one). Kitboga didn’t just find something better, automating him wasting time with others: I recognize that team huddled around a table. That’s a product team. It felt more like a physical product team, like what you see in Mark Rober’s video about his toy company, but suddenly it clicked:
I didn't like Kitboga videos, not just because they were ineffective, but because they couldn’t scale. He had to spend time wasting their time, “making content” to get one caller to waste his time. This video is about someone who has done intensive work until now, switching to automation and opening himself to extensive work.
This time, fighting spammers doesn't rely on at least enough of them being “minstrels” (caricatural entertaining stereotypes: the thing that led to the expression “black face”) to make “good content.” It works as a video based on the excitement around building and iterating on a product, led by data.
Well, presumably led by data: I haven’t watched beyond the second minute when he says they were tracking “EVERY click,” so my product analyst self suddenly felt very involved in that part.
That’s why I like (and I’m assuming everyone on HN likes) Mark Rober’s videos: he builds a product. There’s some story-telling, but he clearly follows the ups and downs of trying to build a systematic solution to a given problem. This is something that MR wasn't able to do in the video with spies getting inside the call center.
I sometimes struggle to explain my theory about intensive and extensive work, or what makes a company “product-driven,” and why it’s so important. You rarely have both options that are easy to compare favorably in an industry without the gap in quality being so prevalent: industrial bread vs. hand-make baker, ready-to-wear vs. bespoke fashion. But for so much software, having an industrial option is usually better because quantity has a quality of its own.
Here, Kitboga is trying to fight an industry. It doesn’t matter that he’s witty every time he’s talking to an agent; he just needs to be witty enough to edit it into his video. To fight scammers, he needs scale — a different scale than what millions of viewers can give him. This automation will allow him to waste so much scammer time that he might make the sector unprofitable. Not sure when, where, or how… (indeed, they’ll notice when they step in a maze?), but that glimpse at possible success where no one thought that was possible. Everyone who started a company knows that moment, the product-market-fit, the Road-to-Damascus glimpse:
“Are you a billionaire?
- Not yet, but soon.
- How?!
- That one guy said that I’ve made his day a little bit better.”
Seeing someone work on something for years and finally change—that’s a rare sight. I’m happy it was all filmed.
Plus, those look like horrifying UX dark patterns. I love those. Now that I’ve wasted everyone’s time with my theory, my partner is finally home: let’s watch it.
With $1M+ wallets? I do not think poor means what you think it means. Granted, his mention of that was nearer to the end of the video.
In the beginning it seems okay, have a bunch of people pretend to be victims and waste scammers time, but later on with starting to deploy malware and zero-days, spying on people with their web cam... Just because scammers break the law doesn't mean we have to stoop to their level. Overall left a bad taste in my mouth. It had a strong smell of "ends justify the means" mentality and this is know to turn to s*t every time.
Not everything is a slippery slope, it turns out. It’s ok to go outside with your eyes open still.
Furthermore, aren't most high-trust societies, such as Japan or European countries have similar stock of people. I am uncertain whether individuals like me, who look different due to skin color / have an accent, would be readily accepted into these high-trust societies.
Some of these are arguably "victimless crimes" - like cheating at the school. Yet I agree that the constant exposure to moral failure may lead to desensitizing people of morality.
Unfortunately, I only understand Sinhalese and English. I used to be able to read and write Tamil since it was taught as my third language in school until 9th grade. Now, all I can do is count to 10.
There are a few things that are specifically unique to Sri Lanka, such as the civil war and all the atrocities, and now the new anti-Muslim sentiment, etc. Strangely enough, I have no idea why people ever voted for the president who fled the country (or his siblings), considering they embody the worst qualities from both left-wing and right-wing politics, with government-controlled prices and populism.
Kitboga definitely isn't using veiled racism like other scambaiters, unless you consider scambaiting itself racist to an extent.
As far as the "cannot scale" argument. His videos are educational. Most times here starts and ends his videos with a warning and a message to make sure you and your loved ones know how to spot these scammers. I for one have shared his videos with grandparents and they loved them, but were also saddened that some people do fall for these things. Since they were made aware, I would say they are 10x as safe when talking on the phone and browsing the web, maybe even to a fault since now they call me when something looks phishy... Anyways as long as his channel is growing and more people consume his content and spread awareness, it is scaling.
There is definitely too much Californian energy there… but I have to work with guys like that, so I try to get myself used to the unjustifiable yelling and gratuitous positivity.
I’ve mentioned alternatives who I would recommend in another comment:
> * Shane Wighton of Stuff Made Here in the Pacific North West: more earnest about how hard it is to make hardware > > * Destin Sandlin of Smarter Everyday is the actual fun uncle, a Southern engineer to the core and a lot more earnest on screen. > > * Alec Watson of Technology Connections is a MidWestern fix-it-all who cares far too much about old tech > > * Tech Ingredients is the real deal: New Englander, no messing around, projects that are genuine breakthroughs with enough detail to reproduce in your garage
> unless you consider scambaiting itself racist to an extent
Yeah… It’s not that it is, but it’s not clear enough that it’s not. Makes me feel uncomfortable. The best explanation I have is this joke (about a different problem): https://youtu.be/nu6C2KL_S9o
> Since they were made aware,
I see the argument behind education, and it does scale in that way — I initially listed YouTuber as an extensive work because it’s not a million times harder to make 10 million views than 10 views. There’s more than one input into work.
But I don’t know how many aging people have loved ones who will show them Kitboga videos. He still interrupts scams all the time. He’s a preventative measure in a world with scammers. His mocking of them hasn’t eradicated the practice. If he traps enough of them into eternal Captchas, until the center doesn’t make enough money, then he might convince the rich owners to do something else (train AI, I guess) and make the scam centers disappear. And that feels transformative.
This automated method is cool though, so it makes an interesting video. Could have done without the Kraken shilling though, they are part of the problem.
That made me a bit sad. That now he's getting paid by crypto - arguably the greatest scammer enabling technology since the telephone.
I think that’s the influence of other YouTubers: he’s hanging out with the Safety Third guys, who are (as their name implies) trying to fast-run a Darwin prize. They make entertaining science-y stuff. He’s also hanging out with Mr. Beast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, which I suspect is why Mark is less fun: Jimmy has this extreme discipline of optimizing videos for views that carve the authentic excitement out to stuff cliffhangers every second instead.
For example, Mark Rober’s previous projects, like the always-on-target dart board, are much better. He’s quite smug on this one, too, but that’s his screen persona: an over-confident Californian frat-ish dude turning into “the best” uncle. He talks about this offline; it’s his way of making childish pranks fit his adult frame.
If you like the dart-board one more but thought it was too prankish, you might like Shane Wighton of Stuff Made Here in the Pacific North West: he’s more earnest about how hard it is to make hardware. There are still the occasional pranks (and the over-confidence because he’s using a robot), but there are a lot more technical details. His on-screen persona with his wife (who claims, on screen, to hate all his ideas) is not very credible, but more grown-up than Mark Rober’s Nerf gun fights.
Otherwise, Destin Sandlin of Smarter Everyday is the actual fun uncle, a Southern engineer to the core and a lot more earnest on screen. Alec Watson of Technology Connections is a MidWestern fix-it-all, who cares far too much about old tech. And finally, Tech Ingredients is the real deal: New Englander, no messing around, projects that are genuinely breakthroughs, with enough detail to reproduce in your garage.
The name 419 comes from "419 fraud", another name for advance fee fraud, and itself derived from the relevant section of the Nigerian criminal code.
>> I was also able to discover the name and contact details of John's artist and managed to contact him to confirm he had indeed been paid for his work, although he wouldn't tell me how much he was paid!
But yeah, John got scammed.
They pick widely, and drop the bad ones fast.
I'm not here to convince anyone that he's a hero (or not). I just think his philanthropy is what the original comment was referring to.
>make me $1 million and I'll give you $500k philanthropy?
Even if it was just the equivalent of donating half his earnings, that's significantly more than I think most people do.
Remind's me of the Patrick's long-standing urge for Colin to improve pricing / not using picodollars on Tarsnap.
> His on-screen persona with his wife [...] is not very credible
Love Stuff Made Here. I find those segments so awkward but also very endearing. Cringe levels of forced acting... but it has grown to work.
Some other interesting builders:
Imphenzia - rocket experiments, nozzle design
Jeremy Fielding - robotics, motors, general engineering
styropyro - lasers, optics
The Thought Emporium - genetic engineering, gene splicing, dna editing, etc
rctestflight - rc drones, airplanes, submarines, boats
Clickspring - antikythera mechanism, watchmaking
French Guy Cooking - unique mix of food and diy engineering (never seen a workshop and kitchen combined before)
Technology Connections: interesting content, sometimes the humor is cringeworthy. He knows he's making a cringe joke or a very very lame pun, so he leans into it, "I know this joke isn't funny but the fact that you're aware that I'm aware that I'm making a lame joke makes it funny again ha ha ha" while my eyes roll hard, but hey maybe some people find the meta-joke (or is it a meta-meta-joke? Or am I missing his meta-meta-jokes?) hilarious and clever. Tech Ingredients is so serious and great!
Other YouTubers I enjoy are Matthias Wandel and Electroboom.
His "i electrocuted myself lol" schtick gets old fast but otherwise good.
There are a handful who I haven’t mentioned with the same personality—mostly around niche topics, like RC vehicles, though.
I’m curious what you’d think of Jay from the Plasma Channel: he clearly very personable, but his content is to the point, and he might find something major on the way.
I've been trying to call California EDD to get some back pay for my state paid family leave. There is no option to get what I need online, I need to call in. I've had that exact thing happen twice after an hour of waiting in the queue... phone rings, goes to voicemail, full mailbox, line gets disconnected. And I have about a 1/100 rate of even getting a chance to join the queue when I call; usually I hear that the queue is too full to join at all. It's absolutely maddening and I may never get my PFL paid out properly.
It can be tricky to make it through the automated menus if you don’t speak the language (though I’m sure you’ve memorized the sequence by now), but once you get to a human, they’re bilingual and completely fluent in English.
TBH, I kind of dread when they start incorporating LLMs or better ai, because it will be truly impossible to speak to a human anymore.
Threatening to leave is also a reliable technique to stop ridiculous price hikes and even get hefty discounts.
Sometimes you have to talk to someone on the "retention team." At other times you can do it online. Most recently I preserved the NYT intro rate of $4 every 4 weeks (instead of $25) and I got a 33% discount on an Adobe subscription after they announced a 50% price hike and I started the cancellation process.
I think my bank did that as the experience looked far from the usual chat bot. I just had to say "you cannot help me I need to talk to a human".
EDD: Employment Development Department, appears to be some sort of job seeker assistance group? PFL: Paid Family Leave - Maternity/Paternity or carer style leave.
They manage payments and benefits for unemployment, disability, and Paid Family Leave (PFL), the last of which is paid time off from work you can take when you have a new baby. I think they also manage some statistics and data around employment disability etc.
PFL in California guarantees the state will pay you something like 70-80% of your typical wages, for up to 8 weeks, while you take time off to bond with and care for your baby.
There is no guaranteed paid paternity or maternity time in the USA so I am lucky to live in a state that offers this. You may view this program as either generous or paltry compared to your own countries offerings.
- sincerely, a European
I basically gave up on calling EDD directly as it's just not possible to get through. I did get through to somebody once, in probably over 200 calls, and multiple hour long holds, and it's just not feasible to keep trying to make this with my work and my family and everything. You need to make it a full time job if you want to go through that channel.
Also take note of the menu options you need to select so when you call back you can bypass all the blah, blah, blah in most cases.
That is the only way I've ever gotten in the queue so far though, calling multiple times right at opening hour. And then once in the queue I see the issue above re: no answer / mailbox is full after waiting on hold for ages for my turn.
I also have a thing on my phone that automatically pushes the right buttons as fast as possible to navigate to the extension I need (for a more efficient rejection).
He also started off as a Web Dev. The fake banking websites are all his own work. Really clever stuff, ironically using phishing tactics to catch phishers.
Despicable scum of this earth.
Thanks to Kitboga for fighting the good fight and it's great to see banks and crypto-exchanges immediately freezing the accounts reported by Kitboga.
The remaining mystery for me is how the second victim was able to repeat Kitboga's email address to Kraken support. It's possible that the fake transfer site included this email address somewhere on the page.
Presumably because the scammer's account was on kraken?
REminder that at this point Kitboga and victim had still not connected.
Scammer then gave QR maze infoline # to victim,and asked victim to try to call and untie the knot. That's really how Kitboga got involved.
It was a bit smarter than this (otherwise beautiful) scam, because the conversation flowed very naturally (exploiting the fact that scammers love to talk, given the opportunity). Idea for your next version!
There used to be a bunch of examples on youtube, but I couldn't find them just now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSoOrlh5i1k
https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/comments/5lcfwq/lennys_his...
Also, I highly recommend the movie, "Sorry to Bother You":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry_to_Bother_You
SORRY TO BOTHER YOU | Official Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enH3xA4mYcY
With LaKeith Stanfield playing Cash, and David Cross playing Cash's "white voice"!
The Art Of The White Voice by David Cross and Patton Oswalt (Sorry to Bother You):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxZt3sD3rzo
Watch Lakeith Stanfield Use His ‘White Voice’ in ‘Sorry to Bother You’ | Anatomy of a Scene:
- Voice deliberately downsampled to the point where it's like listening to a walkie-talkie on a propeller plane.
- Insanely terrible pause "music", at full volume, downsampled and volume-boosted to the point where it physically hurts.
- Random disconnects.
- Circular redirects.
And this is while being polite and patient with the poor person working for these assholes all day.
So, three questions -
1. How do scam victims end up in the Gauntlet at all? I thought the idea was that Kitboga and his team pose as marks, send the bogus QR code to the scammer, and that's their whole pipeline. How do legitimate people end up in there?
2. Assuming the above is something like "scammers are clearly manipulating scam victims into helping them with the Gauntlet", doesn't that raise questions about the glee with which he, and all of us, are watching "scammers'" frustration? It becomes a more nuanced moral calculus if some number of the people you are frustrating are innocent people manipulated into navigating this system for scammers. You could argue it's still net good because otherwise the effort spent manipulating them would have been spent doing a real scam on them, but honestly I'm not sure
3. How did they identify the non-scammers who ended up on the platform? If there was a solid answer to this I suppose it could mitigate (2), but it's hard for me to believe (unless it's something very labor intensive that would make the automated nature of the system less useful)
Overall I still enjoyed the video and found parts completely hilarious (and far too realistic given my own experience on phone trees). But the above does give me pause about unreserved support for what he's doing
Kitboga is a youtube national treasure.
I get that this is amusing and a good way to waste scammers' time, but where did he originally find the scammers?
It’s so clearly a scam.
Freeze their credit. Open a new bank account that will be their spending money, transfer money into it on a schedule. Set up regular bills on autopay so they get out of the habit of mailing checks (lots of mail gets sent to elderly ppl making it seem like it's gov and a response is required). Set up MDM on their phones and computers. Get them a low limit credit card.
You don't have to do it all. Credit freeze, MDM, and bill pay are probably the biggest and easiest to get consent to.
Lowtech solutions would just be taking the (bank) key away from the elders, just like they’d hide my grandpa’s literal car keys when he was 70 with dementia.
The fact that phone calls cannot be verified. Why can’t we design a system that can eye ball scan you before you call and verify that you really work for Microsoft. Or verify that I’m pinging off USA cell towers.
For example with the robocall issue the ftc actually implemented system solutions. Why don’t we put it on the ftc to also fix this issue?!
Its possible that the logical end to this is that Kitboga ends up interacting with the most gullible scammers, and the clever ones evolve to recognize the likes of Kit and protect themselves, if it can be called that.
Even this video, when sufficiently viral, is a beacon call to scammers to identify scam baiters.
How long before the scammers start using AI to find patterns in speech content and patterns, to identify Kit early on.
RC Collins, Bud from Ojai, Margaret Gray, Bobbie Dooley, etc. All hilarious.
Scamming old people out of their retirement is the worst thing someone can do. I have no empathy for those scammers.
They are barely paid phone workers just doing scripts and doing what they are told just so they can feed their families.
On the other end of the phone call are people being forced into the same position of desperation through deception. That's their reward for a lifetime of presumably-honest work.
The noble savages aren't that dumb either. These aren't credit default swaps so abstracted from the underlying assets that the product's toxicity is unrecognizable at the nth degree. They're directly manipulating people into draining their accounts. At some level, something about it should feel off.
That doesn’t make it OK, but that is probably how they justify stealing other people’s money.
And many of those scammers make a lot of money, they operate under commisions and bonuses, according to videos from hackers that break into their systems and steal their data.
> I love how Kit has evolved over the years to find out the best way of making scammers go crazy is to treat them basically the same way Comcast treats their customers.
Most of the time they hang up immediately, because the last thing they want is for me to call them back, but recently one scammer took the bait and tried to give me a fake phone number: 123456789.
So I pretended to believe them and earnestly write it down, but I kept getting the digits wrong and reading them back incorrectly, and asking them to repeat it, talking over them by reading the digits back while they were reading the next digits, repeating and swapping and missing digits, pretending not to get that it was an obviously fake phone number, until it drove them crazy that I could not understand something as simple as 123456789.
Then I asked for their company name ("Bitcoin Company"), and web site ("bitcoin.com"), and then tried to have them guide me through logging in, reading them what I saw on the page and clicked on to log in, and asking them where to click and what to enter and what to do next.
They finally got really angry frustrated and yelled at me and hung up, but not before I berated them for being a scammer!
Perhaps they have something else in the works. Perhaps they're gonna white-label the call-center/bitcoin stack they built so that more scambaiters can "apply their brand" and get in on the action.
I'm hoping for some kind of AI representative functionality that just keeps them in a conversation for hours. Perhaps they can run full circle using AI conversation as the victim all the way through to the bank/call-center. Kinda like the Lenny bot.
They do have whatsapp group chats though.
Maybe it's a chicken and egg issue though, maybe only scumbag jerkoffs are attracted to this kind of scam-call-center work. Then again maybe most humans are easily manipulable that they go into such a call-center being a decent person and enter into a Stanford Prison Experiment situation...
As a side note, I believe one of the worst outcomes of colonization is that these countries lost their monarchies and lacked a natural progression to diplomacy. The only way for these countries to develop and reduce corruption is through educated youth engaging in politics and joining political parties to a degree where they dilute corruption, similar to how acid is diluted.
Most of the scammers in the video had thick accents, but if from that you conclude that scammers in general are "non western", that's at best a dumb conclusion, at worst a racist one. I don't know details of Kitboga's scammers' demographics, but there is no logical reason to assume the proportion of scammers in the West is any different than in other places of the world.
This is really the kind of absurdly tone deaf, entitled comment that turns me off the most in HN - West uber alles.
your explanation seems overly complicated.
Since then when I get calls I keep them on the line to stope them from at least scamming one other person.
I have had three on long enough to actually answer the question I ask
"Why would you scam a poor little old lady?"
All three answered the same:
"You people in the west are rich and don't deserve it."
You're reversing causation... Humans as a whole are more apt to follow people that sound confident. Therefore as a scammer, if you want to boost your success rate you need to sound confident. The scammer never wants you to doubt their ability, but they want you to constantly doubt your own.
If they were timid and accommodating, the call would most likely end up as "let me check with my bank and get back to you. Thank you"
It's pretty wild that my $20 subscription earns me a long string of puzzles. Sometimes I am forced to solve so many of the very-difficult-to-solve variety that I just give up and hope that, on another day, they only give me a couple.
I subscribed in the hopes that the utility of it would be immediate and without the SEO cesspool, but ultimately, I'm still losing that time (and paying for the privilege of) providing free labor for model training.
Well that GPT5 isn't gonna train itself
maybe the captcha was made with chatGPT to begin with.
AIs creating jobs for AIs to keep (server) employment at 100%
Deleting cookies doesn't change anything.
I sometimes get through and haven't figured out what's different.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/cyber-scamming-new-destination...
When I was reading through kitboga's site earlier it said that they "make some light of a dark situation" which sums it up well.
As Kitboga says, the scam normally has to end at this point because the scammer can easily verify whether the receipt is fake or not. So, instead, Kitboga and his team created a fake receipt that takes the scammer to the web and call center labyrinth, promising them they can redeem the Bitcoin at the end.
Third party Bitcoin management entities are kind of common now, I guess, so this doesn't raise any big red flags?
Also, once you call in a time or two you are now a proven easy mark and they will sell your number to other scam ops as a premium lead. Just like real sales!
Viewers send in spam emails. They also look for ads on Facebook and other Ad networks that pretend to be virus pop-ups or bank alerts.
After they engage with a scammer, they trick the scammer into thinking the victim has lodged money in a bitcoin ATM. However the receipt is fake and funnels them to the Gauntlet (the endless phone system and verification process).
There is a relatively new technique though: scammers often have victims call them back once the victim has bought gift cards or whatever. So if once you get one of those callback numbers you can just call in pretending to be a victim in process. The scammers don't currently have pipeline management adequate to know if you're really a victim or not.
This lets you skip a bunch of the early and failure prone stages (scammers hang up calls eagerly at the beginning if they get the slightest hint you're not a real victim) and go right to the end game where things are much more fun and the scammers are much less likely to bail out.
Considering a lot of these scams originate from countries with low wages and high unemployment, not really surprising people would be willing to waste a few days for the promise of a year's salary or more.
Low wages sure, but high unemployment is not correct. Most scammers seem to be based in India where unemployment is around 3%.
Is it a faux pas to say the truth, which is Calcutta ?
Some of the scammers in the original video sound Nigerian to me, not sure what the situation is there.
The average salary for a person working in a regular, semi-skilled job, in a tier-1 or tier-2 city, is about 50,000 Rs., or about 625 USD.
For a whole month, working 8 hours a day, if the scammer can scam just 10 people, out of 100 USD each, they will be the top 10% earners in India.
So, if there is a vulnerable victim, earning 5000 USD, means they can almost not work for another 8 to 10 months.
Its part of the same reason so many fall for scams in the first place. They start spending the money (or whatever the reward is) before they have it and ignore any red flags to the contrary.
Some firms actually do both legitimate support/customer service work and scamming side by side. I've called legit companies support lines before and the person picking up starts off doing some scam and them I'm like, "I thought this was Brand X," and they switch, "Oh yes, sorry about that. What was your order number?" That's how bad it's gotten.
Judging by the calls I hear, I don’t give them that benefit at all. They sound pretty happy to scam the elderly.
Maybe as a first-responder that could work, but if you’re talking to an elderly and convincing them to hand over hundreds or thousands of dollars, you do not have my sympathy.
In one video you see them drain some elderly persons bank accounts completely then the next day someone comes in with bag of cocaine and they're all doing lines to celebrate and hopping back on their calls all hyped up.
It's also basically what dealing with a fin tech startup is like, especially in the crypto adjacent space. Getting a hold of a person is basically impossible.
As if they've hijacked the wrong side of scam.
He got a bunch of scammers to give up bank routing information for an ostensible wire transfer using a script he wrote to use speech-to-text software combined with a natural language interpreter which determined what prerecorded voice lines to play. The process took 8 minutes in one case. https://youtube.com/watch?v=maP2DwgdBts
I wonder if someone could do a "background check" on the domain name of the maze website and figure out that it must be a trap...
How is that going to help, pretty sure Kitboga would have enabled domain privacy.
Pushing buttons slowly might work better if fast doesn't work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave
Thank you for clarifying though.
I guess it's their fault for not being smarter, but how can you say they are evil people if they don't know that what they are doing is wrong?
I've watched some of these scammer videos and there are people working for tech support scams who think they are actually helping customers when in reality they are actually selling fake products and services for their employer, but they don't know or understand that they are fake.
Yet I could definitely convince myself to "make these rich biggots pay" for my family ends meet, especially if I lived in some shithole without much hope for improvement. Heck, privileged people have been convinced of worse.
It's not "white guilt", it's perspective.
What are you talking about?
Expressing your thoughts through racial stereotypes makes you look with a person with poor judgment and no common sense.
Perhaps the scammer convinced this lady to handle the call for him since it was taking hours/days of his time. If she was gullible (no disrespect) enough to be scammed for 6 years, she could be easily manipulated into doing their tedious work.
This said, these types of gates exist everywhere online and off. Live in a nice neighborhood and you can go pick up your own Tide detergent right off the shelf. Live near a 'bad' (high theft) neighborhood and you'll ask a staff member to go unlock it for you before you can take it off the shelf. Even things with paid memberships like Sams club I've went to stores that check you match up with the membership ID you're bringing in.
OP doesn't have to give them business, but grabbing his pearls and acting shocked is also the appearance of someone that has not have to live around any kind of economically depressed area at all.
People choose to scam simply because they believe they can make more money doing so. There is also more of a "gambling" aspect to it, in that the vast majority of scammers probably make peanuts at an hourly rate, but every now and then there is a guy that will make multiple years worth of salary in a day.
After wondering why it kept returning a 401 I finally figured out that the API quota was set to zero out of the box and that I had to fill out some form with a bunch of ridiculous questions like "what will be the impact to your business if your quota is not increased?" Uh, I won't be able to use the API at all because it's currently zero?
The end result was that it took about two weeks of back and forth with Google Support trying to make them understand what I was using the API for before they finally relented and increased the API quota to a non-zero value.
I get that Google is probably somewhat protective of the YouTube API and I'm just some Joe Blow looking to query it for non-revenue purposes, but if I were a business it would have been an insanely terrible experience to get set up with a third-party API.
Compared to every quota increase request on AWS which is either self-serve or something a support ticket handles in a few hours typically.
A friend did the same to play around with the larger Nvidia GPUs and never ran into any issues, but my almost 20 years old google account is not good enough?
If only we had an AI that could clean all of that up for us. Sadly, I'm only half joking. I need a beer.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F0peLpovDB8
They were most likely trained to work with the script they have and their technical knowledge is based on that.
I think a lot of these classic experiments are hard to replicate because the people who sign up for psychological experiments know what behavior to avoid.
Most tech support spam calls come from India. That's just a fact.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-insider/tech-support-sca...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-center...
Of course, tech support scams are just one particular kind of scam. Nobody is arguing that India has the largest percentage of scammers in general.
In other words, while the experiment appeared to demonstrate interesting things, those conclusions are based on the specifics of the experimental setup and it would be better to study more representative environments to draw useful conclusions.
From the above discussion: "The Stanford Prison Experiment is frequently cited as an example of unethical research. The experiment could not be replicated by researchers today because it fails to meet the standards established by numerous ethical codes, including the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association."
And the APA ethics code: https://www.apa.org/ethics/code
"Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm"
"8.07 Deception in Research (a) Psychologists do not conduct a study involving deception unless they have determined that the use of deceptive techniques is justified by the study's significant prospective scientific, educational, or applied value and that effective nondeceptive alternative procedures are not feasible.
(b) Psychologists do not deceive prospective participants about research that is reasonably expected to cause physical pain or severe emotional distress."
CSS is often a lot of tedious trial and error, even if it has improved.
That is _exactly_ the spirit of what the parent comment was implying:
>they justify the scamming by saying (mostly to themselves) things like the West stole from the developing countries, so this is them stealing back
That comment doesn't specify India, but is definitively a blanket statement that (most) scammers are from those filthy, no-good third-world, non-Western countries, and justify their dirty third-worldly scams as a "revenge against the West".
Its a sad, racist non-argument. Quite depressing that it isn't greytexted into oblivion.
This is a very apt description of dealing with CSS. And each time a new feature launches your job is to stack the turtles one level higher.
I’ve had good luck not specifically saying “I want to cancel” but something along the lines of “I’m thinking about cancelling, the price is just too high” but that doesn’t always get you the very best offers.
Did you ever have a single history lesson in your life?
Where do you think Afro-americans came from?
Why do you think half the continent is speaking french or English?
Why do you think 14 African countries use a money created and still controlled by France?
Plenty of mines and oil depots are still profiting European countries.
Multiple generations of slave descendants had to pay reparations to France.
Leopold II was chopping hands off Congolese people for rubber.
I'm fairly certain I was discussing scammers. However, I admit my phrasing wasn't as good as I had hoped. Unfortunately, I come from a former colony (Sri Lanka) and English is not my native language. I apologize if my words triggered any PTSD or brought back unpleasant memories for you. I never stated that what they believe is wrong or inaccurate.
The idea is not to scam the West, but rather to work hard so that the West becomes envious. (India recently achieved a milestone by reaching the moon, which stirred jealousy and anger among many people; it was amusing to witness.)
>>> Did you ever have a single history lesson in your life?
Yes, surprisingly, the Sri Lankan syllabus (which constantly changes with each political party shift) did not cover much about Africa or black slaves.
>>> Where do you think Afro-americans came from?
Clearly, they originated from Africa.
>>> Why do you think half the continent is speaking french or English?
Colonization.
>>> Why do you think 14 African countries use a money created and still controlled by France?
Do not know. What is being done to combat this?
>>> Plenty of mines and oil depots are still profiting European countries.
Certainly, I agree.
>>> Multiple generations of slave descendants had to pay reparations to France.
Yes, I agree.
>>> Leopold II was chopping hands off Congolese people for rubber.
Fair point.
---
I'm still not sure why historical atrocities matter. Constant talk about the bad past only serves to victimize people, making them unable to achieve their full potential. Don't waste time dwelling on the past; it's called the past for a reason.
I think this is a very loaded and fraught perspective that ignores a large amount of context.
Colonial powers generally co-opt local heirarchies and utilise the pre-existing state machinery to expediate the process of resource extraction and pacification since doing it from scratch is usually too costly and prone to instability. In many cases this may inflame pre-existing class confict and further entrench social division. It is rarely the case that pre-colonial power structures simply just vanish and are replaced by the colonial force, and furthermore they don't simply vanish post-colonisation leaving behind a template-less society.
Ex-colonies don't exist in a vacuum. Every society on the face of the earth is embedded in a complex global web of economic and political influence. Post-colonial nations can still be implicitly, and sometimes covertly, subjugated through asymmetric trade agreements, power projection, and a whole range of other processes. It is naive to assign blame of a corrupt or floundering region to a simple moral decay in an isolated system of people that just never figured out how to govern themselves. The answer is found when one instead considers the given region's place in the continuum of economic and historic processes that are far too complex to simplify into an narrative independent of context.
And finally, how does a monarchy naturally progress to "diplomacy"? To my knowledge there doesn't exists a single theory that can describe a universal archetype of a how a given human society is supposed to "naturally" develop. Even in western countries, the process of economic development from a feudal mode of production to the current capitalist parliamentary-democracy, is an extremely complicated and poorly understood topic that covers an area of research far larger than the scope any single historian or political theorist. Everything we see indicates that there is absolutely no fixed model of social development, especially not one that isn't contigent on an unimaginable number of nonlinear factors. I think it's reasonable to say that the development of any given society is completely unique to itself, and is the result of it's own unique position in relation to the outside world, and to history.
In any case, what I was attempting to convey is that it is preferable to learn from your own rights and wrongs rather than dealing with the aftermath of a mess left by a third party.
[0] https://www.noemamag.com/the-modern-wisdom-of-daoist-history...
For example places like Singapore and South Korea have had positive and close relations with the United States, both diplomatically and economically, and specifically in the case of South Korea, have been the recipient of an immense amout of US foreign aid in the context of the Cold War.
On the contrary, places like Cuba and North Korea who favoured political self-determination, and economic policies that focused on bolstering the local population over trade with the US, have very quickly turned into advesarial relationships. In both these cases they ended up aligning themselves with the alternate superpower. This uneasy situation proved tolerable for a few decades (for example, North Korea's economy actually recovered quicker - intitially - than South Korea after the Korean War despite sustaining far greater damage from the bombing campaign), but once the USSR collapsed, Cuba and North Korea entered into the sad state they are today being completely isolated, economically and politically.
And then there's also the issue of governance. Both South Korea and North Korea were brutal dictatorships for decades, but eventually South Korea liberalised their political system, whilst on the other hand North Korea is, well, North Korea. (The same is true, to some degree, of Cuba as well but I would like to qualify this by saying that the depiction of the despotism of Cuba's government in western media tends to be unfairly exaggerated - due to obvious reasons - compared to other regimes of similar or worse nature such as Saudi Arabia).
But this can't be soley due to a difference in ideology, since most of the countries the US supported during the 20th century where infamous for the brutality of the regimes (Park Chung-hee, Samoza, Noriega, House of Saud, Ferdinand Marcos, Pinochet, Papa Doc, Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco and so on). Or even more covert campaigns of support and influence such as Operation Gladio in post-war Europe, the Free Albania National Comitee, Iran-Contra, et cetera.
However this is a far more controversial topic and it's not my intention to start an argument around politics and ideology. I simply want to make the point that the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of a given government has far more to do with historical and economic context than the merit of any particular policy or competency of a governing state. Of course this is still a very valid and important topic, just one that I feel is given undue weight relative to other factors.
All of this is of course a huge over simplification and doesn't do any of the numerous topics I've skimmed over any justice.