5 ms·

Spying on Scammers [video]

84 points by nmstoker 7y ago

tartoran 7y ago
Wow, kudos to this guy, he did a lot of work to uncover these scammers and still uncovering more. I was attempted to be scammed by phone but quickly figured out it was a scam, IRS never calls, but older people bite into these scams. I think more should be done to prevent these.
THE_PUN_STOPS 7y ago
Awesome to see ‘Jim’ on the BBC! If you like this, there’s a lot more on his YouTube channel. His more adversial videos are justice porn. https://youtube.com/channel/UCBNG0osIBAprVcZZ3ic84vw https://youtube.com/channel/UCBNG0osIBAprVcZZ3ic84vw
- buran77 7y ago
  While it's very satisfying to see the scammers being "pwned", unfortunately there's too little real life impact on the scammer market. They operate from poor regions where an overextended (possibly corrupt?) police force has little incentive or possibility to pursue such crimes. From their perspective they are essentially victimless crimes. The victims can't complain, they're are on the other side of the world, too far to matter when there are more pressing matters at home, and the fact that they can afford it lessens the moral burden of stopping the crime.
me_me_me 7y ago
It's funny how they credit "Jim Browning", but are careful not to mention he's youtuber doing scam baiting videos.
- willvarfar 7y ago
  I hadn’t heard of Jim before, but from watching the report, I understood he is breaking the law and that it is all on YouTube etc etc. The report did an excellent job of making that clear imo.
- exhilaration 7y ago
  Did you actually watch the video? They show his YouTube channel, his YouTube subscriber count, and his total number of his YouTube views - all very dramatically.
ipython 7y ago
"What Jim did was illegal." That sentence annoys the heck out of me. As in- somehow - his actions should be vilified, yet the scammers ON THE VIDEO are provided the benefit of "allegations" against them? It's very clear to me that we have lost trust in our public institutions because they have failed us. It is trivial, given a lack of a certain moral compass, to set up an international call center scam like the one in this story. I receive at least 3-4 of these calls per day on my own phone - the scale is absolutely immense. And yet the person who successfully reveals the depravity of what these people do is the one who is the criminal? To that I say let the scammers try and sue him. If the governments can't or don't have the will to solve the problem, I say let the people do it for them. Before you accuse me of advocating for vigilante justice, there is precedent for this sort of thing: the TCPA, passed by Congress in 1991, provides for a Private Right of Action against these telephone scammers - meaning that private individuals have the right to sue the scammers, rather than waiting for collective government action. However, this no longer works with the international scale of modern phone scams. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. The cost of making phone calls over VoIP is basically zero at this point. I believe that the solution is simple: first, make the economics work against the scammers by making VoIP more expensive and use those funds to create an abuse reporting and enforcement mechanism; second, make the source of all phone calls completely transparent to end-users (or at least power-users). VoIP abuse must be taken seriously otherwise there will be no public telephone network left for the rest of us. It'll just be a bunch of bots calling each other and us- what a dystopia.
- pjc50 7y ago
  It's amazing how email spam exploded in the nineties and was fought over for a couple of decades before the current uneasy truce was established. And now we're seeing phone calls have the same problems. You could even cross "charge more" and "authenticate senders" off the spam solutions bingo card. (This seems to be less prevalent in the EU, but maybe that's my imagination? Or due to having only a mobile? We're certainly not free of tech support scammers)
  - concerned_user 7y ago
    Both issues started because of the same reason, the legacy systems that were designed to operate in trusted networks, were connected to an untrusted one, like the internet, without proper filtering, authentication and authorization. I am in the EU and yes it is less prevalent because know your customer is more strictly enforced on telecoms and also newer infrastructure, smaller companies so capital costs for countermeasures are less. Mostly the stricter government regulation.
netsharc 7y ago
Overuse of the glitch effects annoyed me... over-editing.
- monkeynotes 7y ago
  BBC news has long been declining toward entertainment, just like many other news outlets.
  - rjmunro 7y ago
    This was a clip from Panorama, which has been particularly bad for this kind of thing. BBC News proper is not as bad.
alex_duf 7y ago
For what it's worth I always try to keep scammers as long as I can. Time spent on me won't be spent scamming someone else.
kwhitefoot 7y ago
Ouch. That was unwatchable.
reallybigguy 7y ago
If you find this sort of "justice porn" interesting you might enjoy listening to Toao.net's "Lenny" bot. It's basically a telemarketer (and often scammer) time wasting machine that often seems to lead to spirited outbursts. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nOGWrXlhl-i_3g https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nO...

84 points by nmstoker 7y ago

Wow, kudos to this guy, he did a lot of work to uncover these scammers and still uncovering more. I was attempted to be scammed by phone but quickly figured out it was a scam, IRS never calls, but older people bite into these scams. I think more should be done to prevent these.

THE_PUN_STOPS 7y ago

Awesome to see ‘Jim’ on the BBC! If you like this, there’s a lot more on his YouTube channel. His more adversial videos are justice porn. https://youtube.com/channel/UCBNG0osIBAprVcZZ3ic84vw https://youtube.com/channel/UCBNG0osIBAprVcZZ3ic84vw

buran77 7y ago
While it's very satisfying to see the scammers being "pwned", unfortunately there's too little real life impact on the scammer market. They operate from poor regions where an overextended (possibly corrupt?) police force has little incentive or possibility to pursue such crimes. From their perspective they are essentially victimless crimes. The victims can't complain, they're are on the other side of the world, too far to matter when there are more pressing matters at home, and the fact that they can afford it lessens the moral burden of stopping the crime.

me_me_me 7y ago

It's funny how they credit "Jim Browning", but are careful not to mention he's youtuber doing scam baiting videos.

willvarfar 7y ago
I hadn’t heard of Jim before, but from watching the report, I understood he is breaking the law and that it is all on YouTube etc etc. The report did an excellent job of making that clear imo.
exhilaration 7y ago
Did you actually watch the video? They show his YouTube channel, his YouTube subscriber count, and his total number of his YouTube views - all very dramatically.

ipython 7y ago

"What Jim did was illegal." That sentence annoys the heck out of me. As in- somehow - his actions should be vilified, yet the scammers ON THE VIDEO are provided the benefit of "allegations" against them? It's very clear to me that we have lost trust in our public institutions because they have failed us. It is trivial, given a lack of a certain moral compass, to set up an international call center scam like the one in this story. I receive at least 3-4 of these calls per day on my own phone - the scale is absolutely immense. And yet the person who successfully reveals the depravity of what these people do is the one who is the criminal? To that I say let the scammers try and sue him. If the governments can't or don't have the will to solve the problem, I say let the people do it for them. Before you accuse me of advocating for vigilante justice, there is precedent for this sort of thing: the TCPA, passed by Congress in 1991, provides for a Private Right of Action against these telephone scammers - meaning that private individuals have the right to sue the scammers, rather than waiting for collective government action. However, this no longer works with the international scale of modern phone scams. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. The cost of making phone calls over VoIP is basically zero at this point. I believe that the solution is simple: first, make the economics work against the scammers by making VoIP more expensive and use those funds to create an abuse reporting and enforcement mechanism; second, make the source of all phone calls completely transparent to end-users (or at least power-users). VoIP abuse must be taken seriously otherwise there will be no public telephone network left for the rest of us. It'll just be a bunch of bots calling each other and us- what a dystopia.

pjc50 7y ago
It's amazing how email spam exploded in the nineties and was fought over for a couple of decades before the current uneasy truce was established. And now we're seeing phone calls have the same problems. You could even cross "charge more" and "authenticate senders" off the spam solutions bingo card. (This seems to be less prevalent in the EU, but maybe that's my imagination? Or due to having only a mobile? We're certainly not free of tech support scammers)
- concerned_user 7y ago
  Both issues started because of the same reason, the legacy systems that were designed to operate in trusted networks, were connected to an untrusted one, like the internet, without proper filtering, authentication and authorization. I am in the EU and yes it is less prevalent because know your customer is more strictly enforced on telecoms and also newer infrastructure, smaller companies so capital costs for countermeasures are less. Mostly the stricter government regulation.

netsharc 7y ago

Overuse of the glitch effects annoyed me... over-editing.

monkeynotes 7y ago
BBC news has long been declining toward entertainment, just like many other news outlets.
- rjmunro 7y ago
  This was a clip from Panorama, which has been particularly bad for this kind of thing. BBC News proper is not as bad.

alex_duf 7y ago

For what it's worth I always try to keep scammers as long as I can. Time spent on me won't be spent scamming someone else.

kwhitefoot 7y ago

Ouch. That was unwatchable.

reallybigguy 7y ago

If you find this sort of "justice porn" interesting you might enjoy listening to Toao.net's "Lenny" bot. It's basically a telemarketer (and often scammer) time wasting machine that often seems to lead to spirited outbursts. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nOGWrXlhl-i_3g https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nO...