there are certain phrases that when i read them, i hear the voice of specific people saying them in specific ways. typically this is movie phrases, but "why did you do that?!?!?!" from one of the scammers is now in my head.
The twist at the end is wonderful in so many ways. Kitboga, by complete happenstance, directly saves someone from a prolonged scam. Not only that, but he may have inadvertently stumbled upon a new technique to help out victims. Trick the scammers into giving their victims Kitboga's number so he can help them directly. I am excited for his future endeavors.
This situation didn't make any sense to me. Wasn't Kitboga and his team playing the part of the party being scammed? What did this lady have to do with bitcoin receipt/qr-code?
They are playing the part of the scammed. and the part of the support group helping the scammer. Kitboga got "scammed", says he went to an ATM, deposited money, and got a receipt with a QR code. The code leads to Kitboga's website and telephone service. How an innocent lady got his number isn't clear. Maybe the scammers switched receipts on accident, got frustrated, and told the lady to deal with customer service herself.
I'm guessing they attempted to outsource the work of dealing with Kit's "customer support" to one of their more malleable blackmail/extortion/scam victims.
The scammers were in full belief that Kitboga's cryptocurrency transfer service was legitimate. The scammers had a second victim who was unable to transfer her cryptocurrency to the scammers. The scammers instructed the victim to contact both Kraken as well as Kitboga's service to help complete her bitcoin transfer.
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.
i think for some reason the scammer asked the victim to call kraken
Presumably because the scammer's account was on kraken?
The really odd part is how the scammer came across some of Kitboga's real info (kraken account, email, etc). Since that was the key detail that allowed Kraken to flag the victim's existing to Kitboga.
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.
This is one of the best paybacks I’ve seen to date. Marvellous, there’s nothing dodgy or nasty about it, just breaking a scammers spirit in the most comical way. Well done!
He only gives scammers the QR code that leads into his gauntlet. Normal people shouldn't be stumbling into this, as it requires a fake QR code from a fake Bitcoin ATM receipt. This also lures the scammers in as they believe they will receive (someone else's) Bitcoin.
sure, but you won't be scamming them, so it's all in fun troll spirit. frankly, i've met some asshats in the real world that i wouldn't mind pulling pranks like this on.
Scammers have recruited at least one victim to try to complete the fake withdrawal process for them. Luckily Kit and his team noticed and got her help. He was live streaming and only showed his side of the call. It has rather sad since it was clear the victim was very vulnerable (a lonely veteran with a brain injury who was being scammed for years).
I understand your concern. kitboga goes to great lengths to ensure only scammers are harmed by his anti-scam tactics; and, while it may be theoretically possible that a scammer has brought in an unassuming victim to do this work for him, the odds are very low, sufficient that it is reasonable to believe it doesn’t happen, or is caught fast.
I always wonder if Kitboga was influenced by comedian Phil Hendrie. I grew up listening to Phil on the radio and they have very similar styles. Love it, hilarious.
> 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.
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.
No sympathy for those scum. If it was your low-income parents being scammed of their life savings, you wouldn’t either. No one is stopping these criminals. There is no legal system to pursue them. They operate largely outside of any repercussions. No sympathy for those scum.
I would condone anything short of strangling the life out of them with one's bare hands. Clearly you've never known someone who's been preyed up on by these animals.
419 Eater was a place to show-off, coordinate, discuss tactics, etc. Topic: Scambaiting
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.
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 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!
If they aren't smart enough to know better 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.
That is the sad reality of this. Most the scammers would probably prefer to work a legitimate job, but circumstances have forced them into this. I don’t think most of them willingly choose to rip off people, but given the choice between stealing from a stranger, painlessly, or having their children starve, we’d all make the same choice.
That doesn’t make it OK, but that is probably how they justify stealing other people’s money.
Don't bring white guilt into this. Desperation doesn't excuse depravity, nor should it.
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.
I have very similar morals to you, although I'm white and privileged like most of us.
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.
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.
That’s correct. Their employers should be held liable, squeezed for every last nickel, and forced to shut down permanently. That the employees chose their criminal employment unwisely or unwittingly is regrettable.
I love Kitboda's videos. The one thing that strikes me all the time is how arrogant, smug, full of themselves these scammers always sound. They do profoundly believe they're oh-so-intelligent and don't hesitate to make fun of the old people they (think they) are speaking to.
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.
In regards to the arrogance... I imagine they have to be like that in order to be able to sleep at night, they justify the scamming by saying (mostly to themselves) things like the West stole from the developing countries, so this is them stealing back, and they have to believe the victims deserve it so they can, I repeat, sleep at night. Another justification might be "Look at this stupid moron, I won't feel bad stealing from them because someone would inevitably do, since they're so dumb!", i.e. they have to believe the victims are dumb in order to convince themselves of the previous sentence.
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...
They were not. The Stanford Prison Experiment used to be a case study on people following orders and fulfilling assigned roles, and now it's the case study for the problem of the replication crisis.
It wasn't an experiment in the first place, it was a political stunt with a predetermined outcome. All the participants were coached in the political implications of the stunt and told how they should behave. Psychology departments present it to undergrads as a legitimate experiment with some ethical issues because their discipline is a pseudoscience (or if you're inclined to be generous, a humanity masquerading as science.)
There isn't a specific ban on replicating the Stanford Prison experiment but instead a ban because it would violate current ethical codes for experiments, that any information gathered through a replication would not be generalizable. Here is one discussion:
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-stanford-prison-experiment-...
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."
"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."
The effect happens all the time in MMOs and something like Reddit.
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.
Yes, they definitely believe the West stole their money. This is what you hear every day from government propaganda (based on personal experience; refer to my other comment on the original post). Breaking out of propaganda is not a simple task for any individual. While the West may have colonized these countries in the past, it is the government and corruption that are currently responsible for the theft. Moreover, people from these countries are exposed to scams from as early as 5-10 years old. Eventually, this exposure leads to normalization, I believe.
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.
> I believe one of the worst outcomes of colonization is that these countries lost their monarchies and lacked a natural progression to diplomacy
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.
Apologies, I agree with everything you mentioned in your comment. I realize now that I made a significant mistake in my previous sentence. I understand a different perspective on how someone could interpret and understand it, and I appreciate you enlightening me.
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.
Thank you for this incredibly perspicacious comment. It’s not my area of expertise, but I just read Dingxin Zhao, writing for Noēma, observing many of the same shortcomings of considering social development through a teleological lens [0]. I’m still considering what to make of the “Daoist perspective of history” that he recommends as an alternative, but his prescription of humility sure resonated for me!
It's still possible to compare former colonies and evaluate the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of their governments. Singapore is a former colony and fares very well compared to its neighbors in forming its own government.
Right, and I'd further argue that one of the most significant deciding factor in such cases is the relation of those former colonies to the hegemonic power (either in the region or globally).
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.
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.
At the risk of making my most political comment on HN, which I usually like to avoid, some people (both the elite and the rest) prefer to rehash the past to avoid any uncomfortable discussions about their direct role in what’s presently wrong, and their responsibility or role in improving it. Easier and more popularly appealing to just blame 200-year-old dead Europeans for all the problems than to talk about your corrupt plutocracy.
I concur with your viewpoint. Furthermore, I believe that blaming dead Europeans and holding skilled immigrants accountable for job displacement are two sides of the same coin.
What? That's a ridiculous, patronizing, borderline racist comment.
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.
>Nobody is arguing that India has the largest percentage of scammers in general.
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.
>The one thing that strikes me all the time is how arrogant, smug, full of themselves these scammers always sound.
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.
I was thinking about the scammer’s side. If a password creation dialog asks for the daily Wordle answer and it doesn’t trigger a red flag, the predator isn’t smarter than the prey at all apparently.
By watching a lot of the videos, you'll learn that a lot of these scammers don't seem to have any actual technical knowledge at all. For example, a really old series of videos have Kit use a joke Windows app called Windows RG and scammers still go along with it.
So this is real? I always presumed the person he's talking to in these videos was just a friend/colleague playing the part. Some of the stuff he does to them seems like it would violate international hacking laws or something.
I meant it would violate the laws in the victim's country. There are certainly laws against installing malware on someone else's machine in lots of countries.
> Can someone explain how the scammers are pulled in in the first place? That is, what's the 'funnel' for this?
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).
So, I'm not sure but I think what's going on is that a scammer calls and asks the "victim" (in this case, Kitboga) to transfer funds into one of their Bitcoin wallet addresses. This can be done via a Bitcoin ATM which will then print out a receipt which the scammer asks the victim for a picture of (see [0]).
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?
Why would victims be calling in on the scammer's behalf then? I would assume that would only happen if a real victim somehow has a receipt that ties into Kitboga's fake system right?
I think you have the right idea. And that's what threw me off at the end. How did this lady (as well as the others he mentioned) get pulled in to the mix?
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.
They don'w own this bitcoin wallet of course. They need receipt to attribute payment to them and get comission. They verify transaction and get into the loop.
He calls in to fake hotlines that you can find in google searches and lets them mess around with a virtual machine. When it's time to pay for the "services," he furnishes them with a fake gift card or bitcoin QR code. The scammer now wants to mess around with this fake institution because they think there's a bitcoin at the other end side of the maze.
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!
The classic way is that people forward him the scams or he finds them in web searches.
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.
In most cases, the baiter calls up the scammers. Most scammers send a mail of some sort saying the victim has been billed such and such amount. They leave a number for the victim to call.
You are all laughing, but I was just presented with an impossible captcha trying to login into my OpenAI account, that I pay $20/month for. To solve the captcha, I need to click the puzzle 80 (!) times, and if I make a mistake, I should start everything anew. That's totally not funny. Had to cancel the subscription. Anyway, Phind is faster and better quality.
Oh, you got the ICCRV popup? Don't worry - this usually means you forgot to drink the verification can. So drink the verification can, and then refresh the page, in this order.
Nope, CC is not in question this time. Captcha is before the password. Wonder if there is a youtube video somewhere We Made That sucker Solve 80-click Captcha!
This was my first thought. Commenters here are thoroughly entertained, but all I see are the efforts of people that mold the internet experience into what I have to deal with on a daily basis. They would make great additions to AI and CAPTCHA teams. /snark
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.
I mean, probably true... or at least a person with a high IP address rating.
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.
Yeah, as hilarious as this is when it happens to a bad guy the really sad aspect of it, for me, is that their customer service experience is not so abnormal. If it were, most would immediately identify it as fake. Like, counting the numbers of nuts in a photo is a bit much, but we are so used to horrible CAPTHAs now that it's just plausible. Same with the phone menu, etc.
They didn't even give me the chance to really try it. Less than 10 prompts over half a week and every response is "we have detected suspicious activity on your system, try again later".
Doesn't seem to be a rare problem, subscription or not.
Reminds me of my experience with GCP... "here are 300 bucks of credit so you can try out absolutely nothing interesting because we set all relevant quotas to 0. Good luck trying to get any support, but if you really want, you can try to contact our business sales teams for very serious businesses that will just ignore you"
The zero API quota on GCP hits close to home for me too. Last year I wanted to write a little script that would use the YouTube API to find video URLs from a particular channel. The details on it aren't important; it was something I would only use locally for personal purposes and did a single API call per 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.
For me it was the GPU quota, but the form was probably the same and assuming that I am running a business so I should provide the name and a link to the homepage or something like that? In the end I never received a reply and gave up after a while. Needless to say, I will not give them any of my money because they clearly do not want it...
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?
Tbf the bank thing is already a thing in a very limited capacity, but at some point the scammers figure out a bypass. The phone call thing is interesting but I wouldn't want an AI having all of my phone calls and it'll be hard to convince people to use it since everyone thinks they won't be scammed - better spend that time educating about scams instead. It'll also be much easier to bypass than the bank detection thing as a scammer can easily get access to the product.
I always always never blame the people getting scammed and instead focus on system failures.
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?!
If you're worried about elderly parents spending all of their money and they are accepting of your help, there's a few things you can do.
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.
For better or for worse, the category of “software that silently listens in on calls” is non-existent due to OS limitations. Generally sounds like a lot of work and computation for a very rare situation.
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.
Yea I don’t think this is a technical challenge but a way of convincing people that the all knowing robots aren’t also spying on you for other purposes.
Can these people actually be this stupid? I am having a hard time believing it. I would expect scammers to be more aware of the possibility of deceitful behavior by others. Incredible if true, but hard to believe...
This is basically what surfing the web with a bad IP reputation is like. Captcha upon captcha.
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.
It depends. A lot of these scammers are extremely desperate. Some are forced into it. For others it's just an office job like any other.
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.
Some of the scam baiters have frequently gotten video camera access to scam centers. While some amount of 'forced into' it presumably exists, the common spectrum seems to be more between "just a job" and "they're as awful as you might imagine".
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.
I've been in the phone system for multiple hours with Comcast just to try to get my service activated, so it doesn't seem that inherently ridiculous that one hour with a small company support would result in an unfortunate disconnect at the end.
The further I get into the video (I'm not quite done yet), the more I'm convinced that most of the people calling aren't actually scammers, but are people that have been scammed by the scammer to call to get their bitcoin.
I saw your comment while watching the video, you make me I wonder the same thing. Especially if the accent sounds Eastern European or British and not the typical accent of these scammers...
He streams live on Twitch and the stuff that ends up on Youtube is the most interesting stuff. Watching it live can be a bit of a dud sometimes but other times he has new ideas and it is, as you put it, incredible.
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
Scamming people is a multibillion $/year "market". Aside from Kitboga, there's another channel Scammer Payback that dismantle (sometimes, most of the time disrupt) these large call centers that exist only to scam people.
> but I do wonder how desperate some of them have to be to waste so much time on a couple hundred bitcoin max.
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.
In one of the screenshots, Kitboga's fake page promises them the equivalent of $11k in BTC.
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.
Bullshit. These aren't Indian peasants. They are people with very good English skills, and at least the technical acumen to know how to use computers, and obviously some level of sales ability. There are lots of jobs in tech available for people with these skills. I'm not saying they're super high status jobs or people will get rich, but they are still able to live much better than tons of lower class people in India.
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.
Adding onto this, from their perspective, what're their priors on (1) some crypto website is awful to navigate vs. (2) somebody is playing an incredible ruse on me? The first would obviously seem drastically more likely.
A lot of these might be employees with quotas to beat. There are literally companies set up with physical call centers and employed people specializing in doing scams. I've been thinking if some of these people actually understand they are scamming others, or just following some sort of run book they know little about.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadKitboga is a youtube national treasure.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/tzXRb8PdmJo
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZpkdrm-zGA
RC Collins, Bud from Ojai, Margaret Gray, Bobbie Dooley, etc. All hilarious.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
That doesn’t make it OK, but that is probably how they justify stealing other people’s money.
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.
What are you talking about?
Expressing your thoughts through racial stereotypes makes you look with a person with poor judgment and no common sense.
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.
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.
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.
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...
your explanation seems overly complicated.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knhQ2f8anT8
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHQUS-JSSKs
I get that this is amusing and a good way to waste scammers' time, but where did he originally find the scammers?
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).
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?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWzz3NeDz3E&t=150s
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzXRb8PdmJo
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!
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.
maybe the captcha was made with chatGPT to begin with.
AIs creating jobs for AIs to keep (server) employment at 100%
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.
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.
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.
Well that GPT5 isn't gonna train itself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVFYFr4Vy8I
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?
Deleting cookies doesn't change anything.
I sometimes get through and haven't figured out what's different.
It’s so clearly a scam.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
As if they've hijacked the wrong side of scam.
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.
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
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.
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.
Is it a faux pas to say the truth, which is Calcutta ?
Low wages sure, but high unemployment is not correct. Most scammers seem to be based in India where unemployment is around 3%.
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.
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.
Some of the scammers in the original video sound Nigerian to me, not sure what the situation is there.