4 ms·

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 behav

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...

marginalia_nu 3y ago
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.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
If they were that smart, they would have real jobs
- pixl97 3y ago
  Eh, I do support work and work with a lot of large multinationals... being smart is not required it seems. And those are people with legit job titles.
themagician 3y ago
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.
- corbezzoli 3y ago
  > Some are forced into it. 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.
- nullc 3y ago
  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.
esrauch 3y ago
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.
hateful 3y ago
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. As if they've hijacked the wrong side of scam.
- netsharc 3y ago
  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...
netsharc 3y ago
The cleverer scammers, or ones who think "This is bullshit" don't make it into the video... 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...
- sumedh 3y ago
  > I wonder if someone could do a "background check" on the domain name How is that going to help, pretty sure Kitboga would have enabled domain privacy.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
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 https://youtube.com/watch?v=maP2DwgdBts

marginalia_nu 3y ago

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.

shortrounddev2 3y ago

If they were that smart, they would have real jobs

pixl97 3y ago
Eh, I do support work and work with a lot of large multinationals... being smart is not required it seems. And those are people with legit job titles.

themagician 3y ago

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.

corbezzoli 3y ago
> Some are forced into it. 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.
nullc 3y ago
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.

esrauch 3y ago

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.

hateful 3y ago

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. As if they've hijacked the wrong side of scam.

netsharc 3y ago
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...

netsharc 3y ago

The cleverer scammers, or ones who think "This is bullshit" don't make it into the video... 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...

sumedh 3y ago
> I wonder if someone could do a "background check" on the domain name How is that going to help, pretty sure Kitboga would have enabled domain privacy.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

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 https://youtube.com/watch?v=maP2DwgdBts