If you play with fire, you’ll get burned. While scammers might think that they’re at the top of the food chain and everybody else is their prey, this isn’t always the case. There are various tech-savvy Robin Hoods on the internet who are protecting us from scammers and fraudsters by exposing them with advanced methods. And Scambaiter, from India, is one of these everyday heroes.
In a viral video that’s gotten nearly 15 million views in less than a month since being published, Scambaiter demonstrated how he spooked a scammer by showing him the view from his webcam. His reaction—priceless.
Scroll down to check out how everything went down and to have a look at the full video. Like what you see? Consider following Scambaiter’s social media pages to see his latest skirmishes with various scammers.
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“The scam they run is very primitive and simple”
“First, this scammer sends an email. This email tells people that they have ordered something and if they haven’t done this, which obviously they haven’t, they should call the Amazon refund team”
“Once you call this number, you get connected to a call center in India where people like Kedarnath will pick up”
“‘We are going to send you a verification code, please help me with the verification that you are going to receive.’ What this scammer is doing here is that he is pretending to send the victim a verification message from Amazon. Well, the message is an actual message from Amazon but it’s to reset the password”
“Once the scammer is in and he has changed the victim’s password, he starts sniffing around to the information and looking for an attached credit card to the Amazon account that he can buy himself”
“By hacking into the victim’s Amazon account through a very believable way of social engineering, the scammer gets all of the victim’s information. He pretends like this information is coming from his Amazon database and that’s why victims start trusting these guys”
“This victim has paid the scammers 1,000 US dollars”
“I decided to run a GPS scan on a reverse proxy on this camera’s network and those coordinates take us to the very north of New Delhi”
“There was only one guy with that information and the face on Facebook matched up with that from his webcam”
“I’m going to scare him with this face and then with some of his personal info”
“I know everything about you, I know what you do, I know everything about your company. The guy that’s sitting next to you, man. Just answer some questions for me, bro, I can see you right now”
“I tried to talk to him through voice chat of my remote access tool but he didn’t come back, he didn’t want to answer any questions”
“Don’t run away from me I can see you, bro”
Scambaiter created his YouTube channel back in 2015 and since then has amassed a total of a whopping 31 million views. What’s more, after somebody posted a shorter version of the video on Reddit, they got 109k upvotes and a metric ton of digital awards, too, helping further spread the legend of the scammer hunter.
You can watch Scambaiter’s full video right over here!
The Times of India explains that scambaiting happens when vigilantes target fraudsters who try to weasel money out of their victims. These everyday heroes pretend to be interested in the scammers’ schemes, only to later pull the rug out from under their feet, waste their time, or report them to the authorities once they have their details.
A lot of scams come out of India, so the software engineers and cybersecurity researchers who decide to give them a run for their money often focus on this country on forums and on message boards.
In an earlier interview, I spoke about how to avoid scams with one of the moderators of the r/Scams subreddit. They pointed out that educating ourselves preemptively is one of our greatest weapons in avoiding frauds.
“Once you fall for a scam, there is usually not much that can be done, but if you take a short amount of time now to learn more about scams, you can save yourself money and hassle in the future. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” they said.
“The more people who are scam aware, the fewer income streams scammers will have. You’re never going to stop a scammer from being a scammer, but you can help people avoid becoming victims by educating them,” the mod told Bored Panda earlier.
“Every time someone asks about a fake check scam before they go through with it, we are helping them save thousands of dollars. Victims fall for the underage girl scam and think their life is ruined, some even indicate that they are suicidal when they ask us for advice, and we are able to quickly assure them that everything is fine and we can show them many examples of previous posts in our community.”
Here’s what some people said after watching the tech vigilante’s video
Have you ever fallen for a scam, dear Pandas? On the flip side, have you ever caught a scammer and wasted their time? What’s the best piece of advice that you could give someone in order to protect themselves against potential frauds? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.
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