Baiting the Scammers

I AM GETTING A CALL from Indian speaking guy who says he works for Microsoft Windows service centre at California Mountain View. He is hinting that I have is­sues/viruses on my computer and wants the technician to fix it by taking remote control. I refused and he is saying that he will be blocking my Windows ID. Is this a scam or a real procedure of Microsoft?”

This message was posted on a community board of Microsoft in 2012, 13 years ago. By then this scam, which went by the label of “technical assistance”, had become prevalent. Over the course of the next decade, vulnerable people in Western nations, espe­cially the US, would receive more and more such calls. The modus operandi of the scams too would multiply, ranging from fake ro­mances to fake lotteries. There is also the refund scam in which the scammer offers a refund, fools the victim into giving com­puter access and wipes out the bank account. Three years ago, one such scammer rang a victim, who sounded like an old woman. He laid the bait of a $500 refund, then said $5,000 had been transferred by mistake and asked her to return the extra amount via gift cards. Earlier, she had asked him how long the refund would take and the scammer said five minutes. By the end of their interaction, he had spent 65 hours with her and not got a single dollar. She just wouldn’t get the instructions right. Every time he got close to getting into her computer, something would go wrong. He even­tually dropped all pretensions of civility, shouting and abusing her. She remained unfazed. For over two days, he didn’t under­stand that it was he who was being baited. At the other end was Rinoa Poison, a young American woman sitting in front of a com­puter and recording it all. She would later upload it on YouTube and it would go down as the longest scambait ever pulled.

“It came as any other call because you really don’t know at the start how long it is going to be. But he was very desperate, and it’s honestly amazing I was able to waste so much of his time. I wanted to wrap the whole thing up in a neat bow so that I could end it on my terms and not with the scammer figuring it all out. It’s much more satisfying that way. I almost never reveal that I’ve been bait­ing them, because I’d rather they were left wondering whether I was a real victim,” says Rinoa, in an email interview.

She is not the only one turning the tables on scammers while also making a profession out of it. The channel Scammer Payback, run by Pierogi, has 8.22 million subscribers. Jim Browning, who is from Northern Ireland and remains faceless while he busts scams, has 4.41 million subscribers. Kitboga has 3.72 million subscribers. Trilogy Media, run by Ashton Bingham and Art Kuli, has 1.65 mil­lion subscribers. There is now even Daisy, an artificial intelligence scambaiter with the persona of a grandmother. Scambaiters are broadly of two categories—entertainers who get on a call with scammers and have fun at their expense; and those like Browning who actually hack into the systems of scammers to punish them. Some mix both. Rinoa, whose YouTube channel’s 358 videos have a total of 107 million views, is in the entertainer category. She had a background in performing arts, like improv and voice acting and also an interest in role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. After seeing other scambaiters, she realised this fit in with her skillsets. She takes on a number of characters while talking to the scammers. The first time she donned the role of Margaret, an elderly sassy woman ignorant of technology, was also when she made a scammer angry. “I wasted a lot of his time and he was asking for gift cards. I pretended to misunderstand and told the scammer I could pay him in greeting cards, and began reading out greeting card titles such as ‘You’re one in a melon’ (which is where my community got the idea to refer to themselves as melons). Back then, I was still working a full-time job and I hadn’t consid­ered that I could scambait full time. It was more of an after-work hobby to me at the time. It wasn’t until about a year later that I realised I could make scambaiting my full-time job, as I had built a community and was seeing some success,” she says.

The two traits she notices most in scammers are greed and des­peration. One of the tricks of the trade is to get the scammer to remain online for at least an hour because by then he has invested too much time on the call to give it up. Though scammers are from many countries, a majority of those who cross her path tend to be from India. This is because, unlike, say, Nigerians who do it over email, Indian scammers operate via phone calls and that is good for live streaming and content creation. There is a reason why India became such a scam hub of this nature. It had a ready infra­structure model when the BPO sector was established here. Scam­mers realised they could adopt the same model with a criminal tweak, and tapped a ready workforce from cities and towns where unemployment was high. A 2024 study by the consultancy firm ITAD that mapped the extent of scams emanating from Ghana, India and Nigeria, spoke of the organised nature of the scam call centres in India. Some would be just a few men operating from a rented flat but others could be as much as 300-strong with all the trappings of a regular company with “employees, shifts (includ­ing night shifts for international clients), human resources and quality assurance departments, an office for the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and computers and headsets.” The report added, “Recruitment is facilitated through agencies, and employees are given scripts, as well as English and accent training. Often, scam­mers have performance-based payment incentives, such as taking USD 60 if you manage to make more than USD 1,000 on a call.”

THERE ARE INNUMERABLE videos online of scambait­ers hacking into computer systems of scam call centres in India. One, who simply goes by the name of Scambaiter, for example, had three YouTube videos on the same call centre. Operating out of Siliguri in West Bengal, it was in a high-rise building and could be mistaken for any legitimate business with cubicles and young men and women casually going about their jobs. The call centre was pulling off four scams a day of around $6,000 in total value, which meant they were making close to ` 1.5 crore in just a month. After it was first exposed, the call centre shut down but reopened a month later with a rehauled system but the scambaiter had anticipated it and put up permanent backdoor entries. In the third video, he destroys the system using viruses.

Such tactics can be in nebulous legal territory given that CCTVs are being taken over, viruses unleashed and the police are not part of the operation. Many scambaiters in fact try to inform the Indian authorities in places where these call centres operate but with little success. A benefit of infiltrating scammers via hacking is the ability to alert victims mid-scam. Meanwhile, even those who like Rinoa don’t do hacking, help potential victims by creating awareness about scammers. She says, “There are many comments on my YouTube videos saying that they were contacted by a scam­mer, and as a result of the awareness that comes from my streams or videos, they were able to spot the scam and hang up. Or sharing the videos with their family and friends, who recognised they were being scammed.”

Scambaiting is a risky enterprise because these are criminals with resources. Rinoa uses virtual machines and other tools as safety measures. She says, “It can still be risky even though it looks fun, everyone has to enter scambaiting at their own risk. Scam­mers have tried to look for or delete files, or lock the computer com­pletely. But using a virtual machine means it can be easily reset and recovered.” What motivates scambaiters? A combination of social activism, entertainment and work. She says, “At the end of the day, I try to make people laugh. Because many who do really stick to this community are those who have been scammed or know someone who was scammed. They enjoy seeing scammers lose. They enjoy seeing them get angry and have their time wasted.”

crimefake call centresonline fraudScammers