Originally published at: Spending $17,000 in front of gift card scammers - Boing Boing
…
4 Likes
Gift cards are the preferred payment vehicles of choice for these scumbags, to the point where I associate them first with phone scams. The video is fun and satisfying. However, you’d think the big corporate brands associated with them or the services that make them and place them in stores would put in more measures to prevent this abuse.
[I know, I know … "late-stage capitalism.]
7 Likes
This is great. I love listening to him being so civil, albeit a bit impatient, in English and then calling him an MFer and then cursing like a sailor in Hindi. The contrast is beautiful.
3 Likes
This is perhaps the only kind of online harassment/trollling I can get behind.
The guy who made the bot with recordings of a doddering old grampa talking to scammers about his nieces is also pretty good. "Yes, Larissa, she’s the eldest, she knows all about this computer stuff. . . "
7 Likes
Kitboga did something along those lines as well, that is a very entertaining watch. He created a combo of a website + ai phone system with a tree menu and hold times that average to 20-40 hours to get through, and scammers stuck with it, thinking they’d get to claim their cryptomoney from scams at the end… which always resulted in a hang up.
I Trapped 200 Scammers in an Impossible Maze (youtube.com)
6 Likes
That’s the best part for me when I do my (much less sophisticated) “confused old man who sounds like Droopy Dawg” time-waster gag on a phone scammer. When I finally give up the act and start mocking him, the transition from faux customer service tone to frustrated childish curse in broken English delivers the laughs.
5 Likes
I don’t even bother to put on a voice, I just continually get ‘distracted’, “oh sorry, the cat’s being sick, just a mo”, then leave the phone on the side for a minute or two. After a while they realise you’re wasting their time and hang up. I get the impression that they remove me from their lists too, because I very rarely get spam calls.
5 Likes
I would love to mess with these people but I watch too much tv. I believe they will send thier gang to my house and murder me for screwing with them.
I wonder if the scammers this guy screws with are plotting against him.
Lately the only time my mom calls me is for computer trouble. The last one was unless she sent bitcoin they were sending dirty pictures of her to her friends and family because they have been watching her through her camera.
“Mom, is it possible they have dirty pictures?”
“No, of course not.”
“Thank god, than just delete it.”
I get calls like that from other elderly friends.
What I don’t get is they are targeting non tech people yet they expect them to be able to transfer bitcoin, have they ever helped grandma or grandpa log in to their bank account to print a statement?
My neighbor, an elderly widow, called me in a panic several years ago because a scammer convinced her she was going to jail if she didn’t have cash when they showed up. I ran over and sat with her until she calmed down and convinced her she was safe. I finally convinced her it was okay to just hang up but to call me or the police if she thought she was in danger. I miss her.
I hate scammers and am so angry that governments around the world let it get this out of hand.
5 Likes
My work line was getting hit by these guys for several months. I played all sorts of gags on them-- foreign languages (both real and imagined), sound effects, playing dumb, calling them out for the scam, etc.
You’d think that they’d communicate with each other that my number was a waste of time, but no, it almost seemed like they were out for revenge-- I’d come in and there’d be 87 hangup messages on my voicemail.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
