The part where someone waits for a super long time in a queue, finally gets connected, but then gets sent to an answering machine that says "the mailbox is full" hit too close to home. I know this was set up on purpose but I've had that exact same thing happen to me on a real & important government system recently.
I've been trying to call California EDD to get some back pay for my state paid family leave. There is no option to get what I need online, I need to call in. I've had that exact thing happen twice after an hour of waiting in the queue... phone rings, goes to voicemail, full mailbox, line gets disconnected. And I have about a 1/100 rate of even getting a chance to join the queue when I call; usually I hear that the queue is too full to join at all. It's absolutely maddening and I may never get my PFL paid out properly.
FWIW, when I had to get in touch with EDD several years ago and had absolutely no luck calling the main number, I eventually got through with the foreign language numbers. They’re generally staffed higher in proportion to the number of callers they get. IIRC, Vietnamese was the one with the best ratio, though that may have changed in the years since I looked into it.
It can be tricky to make it through the automated menus if you don’t speak the language (though I’m sure you’ve memorized the sequence by now), but once you get to a human, they’re bilingual and completely fluent in English.
Huh, nice trick! Likewise some companies make it difficult (deliberately? surely not!) to get through to their tech support and warranty lines, but their sales number is always answered instantly and sometimes their sales staff can transfer you directly to the right person. Another handy hint for automated phone menus is to just spam # nonstop, usually after about 10-20 presses the menu software will give up and patch you through to a human.
Calling comcast customer support almost guarantees this happens. You call in, repeatedly ask for a representative, they will hang up on you. The only way I've reliably been able to talk to anyone to say you wish to 'Talk to a representative about cancelling my account'.
TBH, I kind of dread when they start incorporating LLMs or better ai, because it will be truly impossible to speak to a human anymore.
> The only way I've reliably been able to talk to anyone to say you wish to 'Talk to a representative about cancelling my account'.
Threatening to leave is also a reliable technique to stop ridiculous price hikes and even get hefty discounts.
Sometimes you have to talk to someone on the "retention team." At other times you can do it online. Most recently I preserved the NYT intro rate of $4 every 4 weeks (instead of $25) and I got a 33% discount on an Adobe subscription after they announced a 50% price hike and I started the cancellation process.
My uncle calls up all his service providers at least twice a year and threatens to cancel just to see what they offer him. It's had a very positive ROI.
I tried that bluff with a cable company once and they put me on hold for a bit, I thought it was to transfer me to retention department so I can get a sweet discount. Then the rep comes back on and said “Ok I canceled your account. Anything else i can do?”
Yeah this does occasionally happen. Had it happen with a credit card that had hiked their annual fee or something like that. Best to be prepared with a backup service or be OK doing without.
I’ve had good luck not specifically saying “I want to cancel” but something along the lines of “I’m thinking about cancelling, the price is just too high” but that doesn’t always get you the very best offers.
Comcast specifically though throttled the retention policies for Sky Italia when they bought them, it used to be that you could get a 60% discount easily, after their purchase it became at most 40% if I remember well
For the literal 98% of the world who don't know these acronyms:
EDD: Employment Development Department, appears to be some sort of job seeker assistance group?
PFL: Paid Family Leave - Maternity/Paternity or carer style leave.
Sorry yes, California EDD is the California state government agency/department you mentioned.
They manage payments and benefits for unemployment, disability, and Paid Family Leave (PFL), the last of which is paid time off from work you can take when you have a new baby. I think they also manage some statistics and data around employment disability etc.
PFL in California guarantees the state will pay you something like 70-80% of your typical wages, for up to 8 weeks, while you take time off to bond with and care for your baby.
There is no guaranteed paid paternity or maternity time in the USA so I am lucky to live in a state that offers this. You may view this program as either generous or paltry compared to your own countries offerings.
It is a state-run department that provides various services related to employment such as unemployment benefits, career development, job coaching, networking, job classes, certifications & additional services for people with disabilities.
Thanks for the tip, I will definitely try that as an alternative option. I just looked up who mine was, and they had a section on their website about requesting help with EDD, so it must be something that they hear about often.
I basically gave up on calling EDD directly as it's just not possible to get through. I did get through to somebody once, in probably over 200 calls, and multiple hour long holds, and it's just not feasible to keep trying to make this with my work and my family and everything. You need to make it a full time job if you want to go through that channel.
this might not be worth it, depending on where you live, but EDD has physical offices. Where, infuriatingly, you also cannot talk to a real person. they have banks of phones you can pick up and it will dial you in to their call system. I had a family member that tried this and it seemed to fast track him to talking to a real person. My experience with EDD is that you just need to get filed into their system. they will eventually get to it whether it is an appeal or request or whatever, they take months to get back to you, but they do. even if it is because they owe you money.
I feel for you about EDD. They still owe us several thousand dollars in unemployment due to a pandemic layoff but I gave up on it after a similar experience to what you’re describing.
Calling EDD at 7:00:00 AM, the second they open, will usually get your call answered. Or it may be 8:00 I forget... If you call too early you'll get a message telling you so.
Also take note of the menu options you need to select so when you call back you can bypass all the blah, blah, blah in most cases.
I've called exactly at opening many times (8:00 am currently), and called back over and over in the morning, even still rarely get in the call queue. Not sure how many people can be waiting but it's almost always instantly full.
That is the only way I've ever gotten in the queue so far though, calling multiple times right at opening hour. And then once in the queue I see the issue above re: no answer / mailbox is full after waiting on hold for ages for my turn.
I also have a thing on my phone that automatically pushes the right buttons as fast as possible to navigate to the extension I need (for a more efficient rejection).
> I also have a thing on my phone that automatically pushes the right buttons as fast as possible to navigate to the extension I need (for a more efficient rejection).
Pushing buttons slowly might work better if fast doesn't work.
I mean the actual worst is having the 4th highest tax burden in the nation and having a dysfunctional EDD that can’t efficiently give unemployment to people who need it.
As a generally left leaning government trusting Silicon Valley tech bro, the California PFL nightmare has been so awful it has been enough to at least instill thoughts of moving to live off grid in Idaho and starting an anti government … group
Wanting a large government and wanting a government to work well are not mutually exclusive.
The worst thing about dealing with EDD is that no matter how poorly run their services are and no matter how much the staff are uselessly unhelpful, they all still have jobs and you don’t. It is a really unpleasant way to spend the day after your company announces that you and everyone else no longer have jobs there.
I know Kit through a friend. Played magic the gathering with him once. No difference between his persona and personality, one of those people made for the job. Absolutely great guy, too, nice wife and kids.
He also started off as a Web Dev. The fake banking websites are all his own work. Really clever stuff, ironically using phishing tactics to catch phishers.
Web Dev sometimes isn't. Sometimes it is CSS and HTML and art/design specialty. I don't say that to be a gatekeeper, I think CSS expertise is harder! heh
I love Kitboda's videos. The one thing that strikes me all the time is how arrogant, smug, full of themselves these scammers always sound. They do profoundly believe they're oh-so-intelligent and don't hesitate to make fun of the old people they (think they) are speaking to.
Despicable scum of this earth.
Thanks to Kitboga for fighting the good fight and it's great to see banks and crypto-exchanges immediately freezing the accounts reported by Kitboga.
In regards to the arrogance... I imagine they have to be like that in order to be able to sleep at night, they justify the scamming by saying (mostly to themselves) things like the West stole from the developing countries, so this is them stealing back, and they have to believe the victims deserve it so they can, I repeat, sleep at night. Another justification might be "Look at this stupid moron, I won't feel bad stealing from them because someone would inevitably do, since they're so dumb!", i.e. they have to believe the victims are dumb in order to convince themselves of the previous sentence.
Maybe it's a chicken and egg issue though, maybe only scumbag jerkoffs are attracted to this kind of scam-call-center work. Then again maybe most humans are easily manipulable that they go into such a call-center being a decent person and enter into a Stanford Prison Experiment situation...
They were not. The Stanford Prison Experiment used to be a case study on people following orders and fulfilling assigned roles, and now it's the case study for the problem of the replication crisis.
There isn't a specific ban on replicating the Stanford Prison experiment but instead a ban because it would violate current ethical codes for experiments, that any information gathered through a replication would not be generalizable. Here is one discussion:
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-stanford-prison-experiment-...
In other words, while the experiment appeared to demonstrate interesting things, those conclusions are based on the specifics of the experimental setup and it would be better to study more representative environments to draw useful conclusions.
From the above discussion: "The Stanford Prison Experiment is frequently cited as an example of unethical research. The experiment could not be replicated by researchers today because it fails to meet the standards established by numerous ethical codes, including the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association."
"Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm"
"8.07 Deception in Research
(a) Psychologists do not conduct a study involving deception unless they have determined that the use of deceptive techniques is justified by the study's significant prospective scientific, educational, or applied value and that effective nondeceptive alternative procedures are not feasible.
(b) Psychologists do not deceive prospective participants about research that is reasonably expected to cause physical pain or severe emotional distress."
It wasn't an experiment in the first place, it was a political stunt with a predetermined outcome. All the participants were coached in the political implications of the stunt and told how they should behave. Psychology departments present it to undergrads as a legitimate experiment with some ethical issues because their discipline is a pseudoscience (or if you're inclined to be generous, a humanity masquerading as science.)
The effect happens all the time in MMOs and something like Reddit.
I think a lot of these classic experiments are hard to replicate because the people who sign up for psychological experiments know what behavior to avoid.
Yes, they definitely believe the West stole their money. This is what you hear every day from government propaganda (based on personal experience; refer to my other comment on the original post). Breaking out of propaganda is not a simple task for any individual. While the West may have colonized these countries in the past, it is the government and corruption that are currently responsible for the theft. Moreover, people from these countries are exposed to scams from as early as 5-10 years old. Eventually, this exposure leads to normalization, I believe.
As a side note, I believe one of the worst outcomes of colonization is that these countries lost their monarchies and lacked a natural progression to diplomacy. The only way for these countries to develop and reduce corruption is through educated youth engaging in politics and joining political parties to a degree where they dilute corruption, similar to how acid is diluted.
I'm fairly certain I was discussing scammers. However, I admit my phrasing wasn't as good as I had hoped. Unfortunately, I come from a former colony (Sri Lanka) and English is not my native language. I apologize if my words triggered any PTSD or brought back unpleasant memories for you. I never stated that what they believe is wrong or inaccurate.
The idea is not to scam the West, but rather to work hard so that the West becomes envious. (India recently achieved a milestone by reaching the moon, which stirred jealousy and anger among many people; it was amusing to witness.)
>>> Did you ever have a single history lesson in your life?
Yes, surprisingly, the Sri Lankan syllabus (which constantly changes with each political party shift) did not cover much about Africa or black slaves.
>>> Where do you think Afro-americans came from?
Clearly, they originated from Africa.
>>> Why do you think half the continent is speaking french or English?
Colonization.
>>> Why do you think 14 African countries use a money created and still controlled by France?
Do not know. What is being done to combat this?
>>> Plenty of mines and oil depots are still profiting European countries.
Certainly, I agree.
>>> Multiple generations of slave descendants had to pay reparations to France.
Yes, I agree.
>>> Leopold II was chopping hands off Congolese people for rubber.
Fair point.
---
I'm still not sure why historical atrocities matter. Constant talk about the bad past only serves to victimize people, making them unable to achieve their full potential. Don't waste time dwelling on the past; it's called the past for a reason.
At the risk of making my most political comment on HN, which I usually like to avoid, some people (both the elite and the rest) prefer to rehash the past to avoid any uncomfortable discussions about their direct role in what’s presently wrong, and their responsibility or role in improving it. Easier and more popularly appealing to just blame 200-year-old dead Europeans for all the problems than to talk about your corrupt plutocracy.
I concur with your viewpoint. Furthermore, I believe that blaming dead Europeans and holding skilled immigrants accountable for job displacement are two sides of the same coin.
> I believe one of the worst outcomes of colonization is that these countries lost their monarchies and lacked a natural progression to diplomacy
I think this is a very loaded and fraught perspective that ignores a large amount of context.
Colonial powers generally co-opt local heirarchies and utilise the pre-existing state machinery to expediate the process of resource extraction and pacification since doing it from scratch is usually too costly and prone to instability. In many cases this may inflame pre-existing class confict and further entrench social division. It is rarely the case that pre-colonial power structures simply just vanish and are replaced by the colonial force, and furthermore they don't simply vanish post-colonisation leaving behind a template-less society.
Ex-colonies don't exist in a vacuum. Every society on the face of the earth is embedded in a complex global web of economic and political influence. Post-colonial nations can still be implicitly, and sometimes covertly, subjugated through asymmetric trade agreements, power projection, and a whole range of other processes. It is naive to assign blame of a corrupt or floundering region to a simple moral decay in an isolated system of people that just never figured out how to govern themselves. The answer is found when one instead considers the given region's place in the continuum of economic and historic processes that are far too complex to simplify into an narrative independent of context.
And finally, how does a monarchy naturally progress to "diplomacy"? To my knowledge there doesn't exists a single theory that can describe a universal archetype of a how a given human society is supposed to "naturally" develop. Even in western countries, the process of economic development from a feudal mode of production to the current capitalist parliamentary-democracy, is an extremely complicated and poorly understood topic that covers an area of research far larger than the scope any single historian or political theorist. Everything we see indicates that there is absolutely no fixed model of social development, especially not one that isn't contigent on an unimaginable number of nonlinear factors. I think it's reasonable to say that the development of any given society is completely unique to itself, and is the result of it's own unique position in relation to the outside world, and to history.
Apologies, I agree with everything you mentioned in your comment. I realize now that I made a significant mistake in my previous sentence. I understand a different perspective on how someone could interpret and understand it, and I appreciate you enlightening me.
In any case, what I was attempting to convey is that it is preferable to learn from your own rights and wrongs rather than dealing with the aftermath of a mess left by a third party.
Thank you for this incredibly perspicacious comment. It’s not my area of expertise, but I just read Dingxin Zhao, writing for Noēma, observing many of the same shortcomings of considering social development through a teleological lens [0]. I’m still considering what to make of the “Daoist perspective of history” that he recommends as an alternative, but his prescription of humility sure resonated for me!
It's still possible to compare former colonies and evaluate the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of their governments. Singapore is a former colony and fares very well compared to its neighbors in forming its own government.
Right, and I'd further argue that one of the most significant deciding factor in such cases is the relation of those former colonies to the hegemonic power (either in the region or globally).
For example places like Singapore and South Korea have had positive and close relations with the United States, both diplomatically and economically, and specifically in the case of South Korea, have been the recipient of an immense amout of US foreign aid in the context of the Cold War.
On the contrary, places like Cuba and North Korea who favoured political self-determination, and economic policies that focused on bolstering the local population over trade with the US, have very quickly turned into advesarial relationships. In both these cases they ended up aligning themselves with the alternate superpower. This uneasy situation proved tolerable for a few decades (for example, North Korea's economy actually recovered quicker - intitially - than South Korea after the Korean War despite sustaining far greater damage from the bombing campaign), but once the USSR collapsed, Cuba and North Korea entered into the sad state they are today being completely isolated, economically and politically.
And then there's also the issue of governance. Both South Korea and North Korea were brutal dictatorships for decades, but eventually South Korea liberalised their political system, whilst on the other hand North Korea is, well, North Korea. (The same is true, to some degree, of Cuba as well but I would like to qualify this by saying that the depiction of the despotism of Cuba's government in western media tends to be unfairly exaggerated - due to obvious reasons - compared to other regimes of similar or worse nature such as Saudi Arabia).
But this can't be soley due to a difference in ideology, since most of the countries the US supported during the 20th century where infamous for the brutality of the regimes (Park Chung-hee, Samoza, Noriega, House of Saud, Ferdinand Marcos, Pinochet, Papa Doc, Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco and so on). Or even more covert campaigns of support and influence such as Operation Gladio in post-war Europe, the Free Albania National Comitee, Iran-Contra, et cetera.
However this is a far more controversial topic and it's not my intention to start an argument around politics and ideology. I simply want to make the point that the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of a given government has far more to do with historical and economic context than the merit of any particular policy or competency of a governing state. Of course this is still a very valid and important topic, just one that I feel is given undue weight relative to other factors.
All of this is of course a huge over simplification and doesn't do any of the numerous topics I've skimmed over any justice.
What? That's a ridiculous, patronizing, borderline racist comment.
Most of the scammers in the video had thick accents, but if from that you conclude that scammers in general are "non western", that's at best a dumb conclusion, at worst a racist one. I don't know details of Kitboga's scammers' demographics, but there is no logical reason to assume the proportion of scammers in the West is any different than in other places of the world.
This is really the kind of absurdly tone deaf, entitled comment that turns me off the most in HN - West uber alles.
>Nobody is arguing that India has the largest percentage of scammers in general.
That is _exactly_ the spirit of what the parent comment was implying:
>they justify the scamming by saying (mostly to themselves) things like the West stole from the developing countries, so this is them stealing back
That comment doesn't specify India, but is definitively a blanket statement that (most) scammers are from those filthy, no-good third-world, non-Western countries, and justify their dirty third-worldly scams as a "revenge against the West".
Its a sad, racist non-argument. Quite depressing that it isn't greytexted into oblivion.
>The one thing that strikes me all the time is how arrogant, smug, full of themselves these scammers always sound.
You're reversing causation... Humans as a whole are more apt to follow people that sound confident. Therefore as a scammer, if you want to boost your success rate you need to sound confident. The scammer never wants you to doubt their ability, but they want you to constantly doubt your own.
The twist at the end is wonderful in so many ways. Kitboga, by complete happenstance, directly saves someone from a prolonged scam. Not only that, but he may have inadvertently stumbled upon a new technique to help out victims. Trick the scammers into giving their victims Kitboga's number so he can help them directly. I am excited for his future endeavors.
This situation didn't make any sense to me. Wasn't Kitboga and his team playing the part of the party being scammed? What did this lady have to do with bitcoin receipt/qr-code?
The scammers were in full belief that Kitboga's cryptocurrency transfer service was legitimate. The scammers had a second victim who was unable to transfer her cryptocurrency to the scammers. The scammers instructed the victim to contact both Kraken as well as Kitboga's service to help complete her bitcoin transfer.
The remaining mystery for me is how the second victim was able to repeat Kitboga's email address to Kraken support. It's possible that the fake transfer site included this email address somewhere on the page.
They are playing the part of the scammed. and the part of the support group helping the scammer. Kitboga got "scammed", says he went to an ATM, deposited money, and got a receipt with a QR code. The code leads to Kitboga's website and telephone service. How an innocent lady got his number isn't clear. Maybe the scammers switched receipts on accident, got frustrated, and told the lady to deal with customer service herself.
I'm guessing they attempted to outsource the work of dealing with Kit's "customer support" to one of their more malleable blackmail/extortion/scam victims.
i think for some reason the scammer asked the victim to call kraken
Presumably because the scammer's account was on kraken?
The really odd part is how the scammer came across some of Kitboga's real info (kraken account, email, etc). Since that was the key detail that allowed Kraken to flag the victim's existing to Kitboga.
REminder that at this point Kitboga and victim had still not connected.
Scammer then gave QR maze infoline # to victim,and asked victim to try to call and untie the knot. That's really how Kitboga got involved.
You are all laughing, but I was just presented with an impossible captcha trying to login into my OpenAI account, that I pay $20/month for. To solve the captcha, I need to click the puzzle 80 (!) times, and if I make a mistake, I should start everything anew. That's totally not funny. Had to cancel the subscription. Anyway, Phind is faster and better quality.
This was my first thought. Commenters here are thoroughly entertained, but all I see are the efforts of people that mold the internet experience into what I have to deal with on a daily basis. They would make great additions to AI and CAPTCHA teams. /snark
It's pretty wild that my $20 subscription earns me a long string of puzzles. Sometimes I am forced to solve so many of the very-difficult-to-solve variety that I just give up and hope that, on another day, they only give me a couple.
I subscribed in the hopes that the utility of it would be immediate and without the SEO cesspool, but ultimately, I'm still losing that time (and paying for the privilege of) providing free labor for model training.
I mean, probably true... or at least a person with a high IP address rating.
This said, these types of gates exist everywhere online and off. Live in a nice neighborhood and you can go pick up your own Tide detergent right off the shelf. Live near a 'bad' (high theft) neighborhood and you'll ask a staff member to go unlock it for you before you can take it off the shelf. Even things with paid memberships like Sams club I've went to stores that check you match up with the membership ID you're bringing in.
OP doesn't have to give them business, but grabbing his pearls and acting shocked is also the appearance of someone that has not have to live around any kind of economically depressed area at all.
Yeah, as hilarious as this is when it happens to a bad guy the really sad aspect of it, for me, is that their customer service experience is not so abnormal. If it were, most would immediately identify it as fake. Like, counting the numbers of nuts in a photo is a bit much, but we are so used to horrible CAPTHAs now that it's just plausible. Same with the phone menu, etc.
Oh, you got the ICCRV popup? Don't worry - this usually means you forgot to drink the verification can. So drink the verification can, and then refresh the page, in this order.
They didn't even give me the chance to really try it. Less than 10 prompts over half a week and every response is "we have detected suspicious activity on your system, try again later".
Doesn't seem to be a rare problem, subscription or not.
Reminds me of my experience with GCP... "here are 300 bucks of credit so you can try out absolutely nothing interesting because we set all relevant quotas to 0. Good luck trying to get any support, but if you really want, you can try to contact our business sales teams for very serious businesses that will just ignore you"
The zero API quota on GCP hits close to home for me too. Last year I wanted to write a little script that would use the YouTube API to find video URLs from a particular channel. The details on it aren't important; it was something I would only use locally for personal purposes and did a single API call per day.
After wondering why it kept returning a 401 I finally figured out that the API quota was set to zero out of the box and that I had to fill out some form with a bunch of ridiculous questions like "what will be the impact to your business if your quota is not increased?" Uh, I won't be able to use the API at all because it's currently zero?
The end result was that it took about two weeks of back and forth with Google Support trying to make them understand what I was using the API for before they finally relented and increased the API quota to a non-zero value.
I get that Google is probably somewhat protective of the YouTube API and I'm just some Joe Blow looking to query it for non-revenue purposes, but if I were a business it would have been an insanely terrible experience to get set up with a third-party API.
Compared to every quota increase request on AWS which is either self-serve or something a support ticket handles in a few hours typically.
For me it was the GPU quota, but the form was probably the same and assuming that I am running a business so I should provide the name and a link to the homepage or something like that? In the end I never received a reply and gave up after a while. Needless to say, I will not give them any of my money because they clearly do not want it...
A friend did the same to play around with the larger Nvidia GPUs and never ran into any issues, but my almost 20 years old google account is not good enough?
Nope, CC is not in question this time. Captcha is before the password. Wonder if there is a youtube video somewhere We Made That sucker Solve 80-click Captcha!
Anyone remember the anti-scammer phone bot that pretended to be a senile old man ('Lemmy' or something)? It waited for the scammer to stop talking, and then said some statement (either a question or some really long rambling story), simultaneously hilarious and expertly crafted to keep the conversation going, often for hours, until it would start repeating itself and the scammer would blow up.
It was a bit smarter than this (otherwise beautiful) scam, because the conversation flowed very naturally (exploiting the fact that scammers love to talk, given the opportunity). Idea for your next version!
There used to be a bunch of examples on youtube, but I couldn't find them just now.
Sorry to Bother You is a wild movie. The less you know about the plot going into it, the better. (I was not expecting... the thing. You know which one.)
Yes, I know the gentleman who created Lenny in Queensland. He's a senior exec these days, so I don't think he likes associating himself with it, but get a few XXXX's in him and you'll hear all the stories.
What I don't understand is the bit at the end (spoilers): he finds out that a person who Kraken's fraud team sees as a victim of scams, but hasn't been able to contact, has called his Gauntlet. He's then able to reach out and help her, as well as other scam victims who end up in the Gauntlet.
So, three questions -
1. How do scam victims end up in the Gauntlet at all? I thought the idea was that Kitboga and his team pose as marks, send the bogus QR code to the scammer, and that's their whole pipeline. How do legitimate people end up in there?
2. Assuming the above is something like "scammers are clearly manipulating scam victims into helping them with the Gauntlet", doesn't that raise questions about the glee with which he, and all of us, are watching "scammers'" frustration? It becomes a more nuanced moral calculus if some number of the people you are frustrating are innocent people manipulated into navigating this system for scammers. You could argue it's still net good because otherwise the effort spent manipulating them would have been spent doing a real scam on them, but honestly I'm not sure
3. How did they identify the non-scammers who ended up on the platform? If there was a solid answer to this I suppose it could mitigate (2), but it's hard for me to believe (unless it's something very labor intensive that would make the automated nature of the system less useful)
Overall I still enjoyed the video and found parts completely hilarious (and far too realistic given my own experience on phone trees). But the above does give me pause about unreserved support for what he's doing
I agree; it feels like what could happen a lot with this system is similar to what people did to get past captchas with their bot software. They might hire some less fortunate individuals to attempt solving it. I found the video funny, but I am definitely aware of how privileged I am not to have been born into the circumstances that would lead to becoming one of these 'damned folks' – the scammers or the victims.
Your questions are really apt. At the end of the day, scammers like this are predators (and of course, the ones featured in these videos are just the tip of the iceberg; scamming rich westerners is a billion-dollar industry) but they are also victims, of the asymmetrical rewards of global capitalism and colonialism at least, but in a more concrete sense, a lot of them are victims of human trafficking who are being forced to work on these scams.
I was thinking about the scammer’s side. If a password creation dialog asks for the daily Wordle answer and it doesn’t trigger a red flag, the predator isn’t smarter than the prey at all apparently.
By watching a lot of the videos, you'll learn that a lot of these scammers don't seem to have any actual technical knowledge at all. For example, a really old series of videos have Kit use a joke Windows app called Windows RG and scammers still go along with it.
there are certain phrases that when i read them, i hear the voice of specific people saying them in specific ways. typically this is movie phrases, but "why did you do that?!?!?!" from one of the scammers is now in my head.
So, I'm not sure but I think what's going on is that a scammer calls and asks the "victim" (in this case, Kitboga) to transfer funds into one of their Bitcoin wallet addresses. This can be done via a Bitcoin ATM which will then print out a receipt which the scammer asks the victim for a picture of (see [0]).
As Kitboga says, the scam normally has to end at this point because the scammer can easily verify whether the receipt is fake or not. So, instead, Kitboga and his team created a fake receipt that takes the scammer to the web and call center labyrinth, promising them they can redeem the Bitcoin at the end.
Third party Bitcoin management entities are kind of common now, I guess, so this doesn't raise any big red flags?
Why would victims be calling in on the scammer's behalf then? I would assume that would only happen if a real victim somehow has a receipt that ties into Kitboga's fake system right?
I think you have the right idea. And that's what threw me off at the end. How did this lady (as well as the others he mentioned) get pulled in to the mix?
Perhaps the scammer convinced this lady to handle the call for him since it was taking hours/days of his time. If she was gullible (no disrespect) enough to be scammed for 6 years, she could be easily manipulated into doing their tedious work.
They don'w own this bitcoin wallet of course. They need receipt to attribute payment to them and get comission. They verify transaction and get into the loop.
He calls in to fake hotlines that you can find in google searches and lets them mess around with a virtual machine. When it's time to pay for the "services," he furnishes them with a fake gift card or bitcoin QR code. The scammer now wants to mess around with this fake institution because they think there's a bitcoin at the other end side of the maze.
Also, once you call in a time or two you are now a proven easy mark and they will sell your number to other scam ops as a premium lead. Just like real sales!
> Can someone explain how the scammers are pulled in in the first place? That is, what's the 'funnel' for this?
Viewers send in spam emails. They also look for ads on Facebook and other Ad networks that pretend to be virus pop-ups or bank alerts.
After they engage with a scammer, they trick the scammer into thinking the victim has lodged money in a bitcoin ATM. However the receipt is fake and funnels them to the Gauntlet (the endless phone system and verification process).
The classic way is that people forward him the scams or he finds them in web searches.
There is a relatively new technique though: scammers often have victims call them back once the victim has bought gift cards or whatever. So if once you get one of those callback numbers you can just call in pretending to be a victim in process. The scammers don't currently have pipeline management adequate to know if you're really a victim or not.
This lets you skip a bunch of the early and failure prone stages (scammers hang up calls eagerly at the beginning if they get the slightest hint you're not a real victim) and go right to the end game where things are much more fun and the scammers are much less likely to bail out.
In most cases, the baiter calls up the scammers. Most scammers send a mail of some sort saying the victim has been billed such and such amount. They leave a number for the victim to call.
In one of the screenshots, Kitboga's fake page promises them the equivalent of $11k in BTC.
Considering a lot of these scams originate from countries with low wages and high unemployment, not really surprising people would be willing to waste a few days for the promise of a year's salary or more.
Bullshit. These aren't Indian peasants. They are people with very good English skills, and at least the technical acumen to know how to use computers, and obviously some level of sales ability. There are lots of jobs in tech available for people with these skills. I'm not saying they're super high status jobs or people will get rich, but they are still able to live much better than tons of lower class people in India.
People choose to scam simply because they believe they can make more money doing so. There is also more of a "gambling" aspect to it, in that the vast majority of scammers probably make peanuts at an hourly rate, but every now and then there is a guy that will make multiple years worth of salary in a day.
Adding onto this, from their perspective, what're their priors on (1) some crypto website is awful to navigate vs. (2) somebody is playing an incredible ruse on me? The first would obviously seem drastically more likely.
Scamming people is a multibillion $/year "market". Aside from Kitboga, there's another channel Scammer Payback that dismantle (sometimes, most of the time disrupt) these large call centers that exist only to scam people.
A lot of these might be employees with quotas to beat. There are literally companies set up with physical call centers and employed people specializing in doing scams. I've been thinking if some of these people actually understand they are scamming others, or just following some sort of run book they know little about.
> but I do wonder how desperate some of them have to be to waste so much time on a couple hundred bitcoin max.
Its part of the same reason so many fall for scams in the first place. They start spending the money (or whatever the reward is) before they have it and ignore any red flags to the contrary.
If you're worried about elderly parents spending all of their money and they are accepting of your help, there's a few things you can do.
Freeze their credit. Open a new bank account that will be their spending money, transfer money into it on a schedule. Set up regular bills on autopay so they get out of the habit of mailing checks (lots of mail gets sent to elderly ppl making it seem like it's gov and a response is required). Set up MDM on their phones and computers. Get them a low limit credit card.
You don't have to do it all. Credit freeze, MDM, and bill pay are probably the biggest and easiest to get consent to.
For better or for worse, the category of “software that silently listens in on calls” is non-existent due to OS limitations. Generally sounds like a lot of work and computation for a very rare situation.
Lowtech solutions would just be taking the (bank) key away from the elders, just like they’d hide my grandpa’s literal car keys when he was 70 with dementia.
Yea I don’t think this is a technical challenge but a way of convincing people that the all knowing robots aren’t also spying on you for other purposes.
Tbf the bank thing is already a thing in a very limited capacity, but at some point the scammers figure out a bypass. The phone call thing is interesting but I wouldn't want an AI having all of my phone calls and it'll be hard to convince people to use it since everyone thinks they won't be scammed - better spend that time educating about scams instead. It'll also be much easier to bypass than the bank detection thing as a scammer can easily get access to the product.
I always always never blame the people getting scammed and instead focus on system failures.
The fact that phone calls cannot be verified. Why can’t we design a system that can eye ball scan you before you call and verify that you really work for Microsoft. Or verify that I’m pinging off USA cell towers.
For example with the robocall issue the ftc actually implemented system solutions. Why don’t we put it on the ftc to also fix this issue?!
I wonder, with increasing popularity, his videos are watched more and more by scammers, leading to less effective content and outcomes. Already, in a few videos, his name is asked out.
Its possible that the logical end to this is that Kitboga ends up interacting with the most gullible scammers, and the clever ones evolve to recognize the likes of Kit and protect themselves, if it can be called that.
Even this video, when sufficiently viral, is a beacon call to scammers to identify scam baiters.
How long before the scammers start using AI to find patterns in speech content and patterns, to identify Kit early on.
I always wonder if Kitboga was influenced by comedian Phil Hendrie. I grew up listening to Phil on the radio and they have very similar styles. Love it, hilarious.
Don't bring white guilt into this. Desperation doesn't excuse depravity, nor should it.
On the other end of the phone call are people being forced into the same position of desperation through deception. That's their reward for a lifetime of presumably-honest work.
The noble savages aren't that dumb either. These aren't credit default swaps so abstracted from the underlying assets that the product's toxicity is unrecognizable at the nth degree. They're directly manipulating people into draining their accounts. At some level, something about it should feel off.
I have very similar morals to you, although I'm white and privileged like most of us.
Yet I could definitely convince myself to "make these rich biggots pay" for my family ends meet, especially if I lived in some shithole without much hope for improvement. Heck, privileged people have been convinced of worse.
If they aren't smart enough to know better though.
I guess it's their fault for not being smarter, but how can you say they are evil people if they don't know that what they are doing is wrong?
I've watched some of these scammer videos and there are people working for tech support scams who think they are actually helping customers when in reality they are actually selling fake products and services for their employer, but they don't know or understand that they are fake.
That is the sad reality of this. Most the scammers would probably prefer to work a legitimate job, but circumstances have forced them into this. I don’t think most of them willingly choose to rip off people, but given the choice between stealing from a stranger, painlessly, or having their children starve, we’d all make the same choice.
That doesn’t make it OK, but that is probably how they justify stealing other people’s money.
That’s correct. Their employers should be held liable, squeezed for every last nickel, and forced to shut down permanently. That the employees chose their criminal employment unwisely or unwittingly is regrettable.
And many of those scammers make a lot of money, they operate under commisions and bonuses, according to videos from hackers that break into their systems and steal their data.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
> I love how Kit has evolved over the years to find out the best way of making scammers go crazy is to treat them basically the same way Comcast treats their customers.
Whenever I get a scam call, the first thing I do is say "Oh, this sounds VERY important, thank you for calling me. Please give me your phone number so I can call you back in case we get cut off."
Most of the time they hang up immediately, because the last thing they want is for me to call them back, but recently one scammer took the bait and tried to give me a fake phone number: 123456789.
So I pretended to believe them and earnestly write it down, but I kept getting the digits wrong and reading them back incorrectly, and asking them to repeat it, talking over them by reading the digits back while they were reading the next digits, repeating and swapping and missing digits, pretending not to get that it was an obviously fake phone number, until it drove them crazy that I could not understand something as simple as 123456789.
Then I asked for their company name ("Bitcoin Company"), and web site ("bitcoin.com"), and then tried to have them guide me through logging in, reading them what I saw on the page and clicked on to log in, and asking them where to click and what to enter and what to do next.
They finally got really angry frustrated and yelled at me and hung up, but not before I berated them for being a scammer!
Yeah, it's tough one. On one hand they make their living with videos and need to producing and releasing, but then blow their cover. On the other, they could be wasting scammers time and effort for a longer time, building up years of material but have to float the all the costs until they're ready.
Perhaps they have something else in the works. Perhaps they're gonna white-label the call-center/bitcoin stack they built so that more scambaiters can "apply their brand" and get in on the action.
I'm hoping for some kind of AI representative functionality that just keeps them in a conversation for hours. Perhaps they can run full circle using AI conversation as the victim all the way through to the bank/call-center. Kinda like the Lenny bot.
Scammers do not have a shared consciousness (some may argue lack a conscience at all) so unless they see this video, they don't know the details simply because it exists on YouTube.
He's already known to many of these scammers, I've seen multiple videos where he was identified. But by that time he'd already wasted the time of two or three people in the call center.
Love Kitboga and this video had me in peels. The fact that this maze thing has actually become something that can inform people who were plagued by scammers is actually really heartening, and reminds me of Paul Graham's words that the best way to get great startup ideas is to work on fun stuff -- Maybe Kitboga has discovered a new avenue for antifraud
While it’s entertaining, it’s just a bit sad that people continue to fall for these scams. The one woman who believed the Amazon refund scam sounded young, maybe in her 40s.
While the idea of wasting the call center operators time appears noble. After watching a few of these scam baiter videos, it appears the call centers are staffed with at least a few dozen people. If one dumb operator stays on the line for 8+ hrs with a scam baiter while the other operators are taking calls from real potential victims. The impact seems limited.
Also, some people will say that it’s educational. But if you look at the target audience of the scammers, it’s mostly the elderly and/or those with dementia or some other progressive mental illness. The education won’t help this vulnerable population.
How do we stop the root of the issue? How do we make it so that scamming the elderly and vulnerable population is not profitable?
The best way to stop, is for systems to be in place, put by family / govt., that limits wire-transfers, or other forms of money withdrawal in forms of cash, unless an authorized or approved guardian be present. Of course, this is for the very elderly.
For regular folk, who may not have much knowledge about computers and stuff, if they hear "mY nAmE is STevEN" with an Indian accent, tell them to shove it.
This looks like the "scambaiter" actually scammed an artist into making some pretty sweet art under the guise of a scolarship. Am I missing something, or is this actual fraud?
>> I was also able to discover the name and contact details of John's artist and managed to contact him to confirm he had indeed been paid for his work, although he wouldn't tell me how much he was paid!
419 Eater was a place to show-off, coordinate, discuss tactics, etc. Topic: Scambaiting
I believe it's origins were going directly after the scammers behind an advance-fee scam, a.k.a. the "Nigerian prince scam". 419 is in reference to some criminal code.
I don't do anything fancy, but I like to be a telemarketing (usually just scams) speedbump.
I am slightly skeptical, but kinda hesitantly agreeable, and try to keep them on the phone as long as possible and go through as many levels of their org as possible and mess with the end sales person.
If just 1% of all people did this, I think it would kill telemarketing. AI bots though are starting to make it annoying. I try to get through their screening questions and get to a human, but sometimes it is clear there is no human to reach.
It would be interesting to see how far the 'scammers' would go in an attempt to withdraw funds. I imagine someone that sits for hours on hold and revisits numerous times would happily install a mobile app. One could develop a mobile app that collects data from scammer while presenting a simple web view of existing trap sites.
To experience what a call center trap is, just call GoDaddy with a technical problem, if they have no clue or seem to be wasting time hang and call again, repeat until and random support person actually knows what you are talking about. Or even better, stop using GoDaddy as I did.
His philanthropy channel has millions of views on each video with 100% of the advertisement revenue, brand deals, and merchandise sales donated to charity. He also runs a non-profit that does charity work.
I'm not here to convince anyone that he's a hero (or not). I just think his philanthropy is what the original comment was referring to.
>make me $1 million and I'll give you $500k philanthropy?
Even if it was just the equivalent of donating half his earnings, that's significantly more than I think most people do.
This is one of the best paybacks I’ve seen to date. Marvellous, there’s nothing dodgy or nasty about it, just breaking a scammers spirit in the most comical way. Well done!
But let's really think about it, isn't it true that most things in the world are some form of a scam?
Growing up in a poor country, I've realized that scams are everywhere, right from the day you start school:
1) Parents resort to scamming the school hiring board using fake addresses just to enroll their children in a good school.
2) In the early years, students learn how to cheat in exams to survive.
3) Teachers unfairly give lower marks to students (or parents) who don't buy into their side hustles like private tutoring or educational CDs.
4) Movies and music are all pirated, contributing to this cycle of deception.
5) Even radio and TV shows shamelessly copy Hollywood productions.
6) Need to get something done at a government office? Be prepared to pay bribes.
7) If you want to leave the country / immigration purposes, you have to navigate a web of bribery and money-grabbing schemes at every level.
8) Far-right racism use pseudo-science to deceive people into thinking that the majority is superior.
9) There are fake diploma and degree providers scamming people within the same country.
10) Interested in day trading? Beware of commission-driven scams and cryptocurrency schemes targeting people from your own country.
11) If you need the government to fix a road, you have to approach politicians and plead for something they promised in the first place.
12) Even small local shops dilute products, potentially selling toxic items to unsuspecting customers.
13) Need water? Attempting to approach politicians is futile. Eventually, the local community took matters into their own hands, establishing a private company to provide water. By the time standard water lines were laid, the locals had already constructed the water tank. (My father played a significant role in this endeavor - the type of person politicians dislike, haha!)
14) As elections draw near, there is a sudden decrease in the prices of goods.
15) Having trouble conceiving? Thinking of consulting the local guru? Don't worry; if your daughter bears a resemblance to the guru, it's all good.
16) A women fell victim to a cryptobro/environmentalist/spiritualist/influencer scammer. Interestingly, this scammers's father is also a con artist who specifically targets older women (he's the old school type). (It's essential to educate your children about pickup artists and red pill nonsense; unfortunately, these tactics sometimes work and are genuinely dangerous.)
---
It's no surprise that people resort to scams, likely due to a lack of empathy, extreme cynicism, narcissistic personality disorder, or some combination thereof. Extracting individuals from this mindset requires significant effort.
Sounds like you are talking about a very specific place. I object to the reduction that "most things in the world are some form of a scam." High-trust societies do exist.
I agree. Extracting individuals from this mindset requires significant effort. -- this applies to me too.
Furthermore, aren't most high-trust societies, such as Japan or European countries have similar stock of people. I am uncertain whether individuals like me, who look different due to skin color / have an accent, would be readily accepted into these high-trust societies.
Some of these are arguably "victimless crimes" - like cheating at the school. Yet I agree that the constant exposure to moral failure may lead to desensitizing people of morality.
Cheating in school is not a victimless crime. Universities offer admission and scholarship based upon your ranking relative to your peers. If you cheat and get a better grade, someone else is bumped down a rank through your dishonesty.
I am a Sri Lankan expatriate. Based on the comments I've read, it seems my thought process is correct, as most of these observations apply to any other underdeveloped nation. These are simply personal anecdotes.
Unfortunately, I only understand Sinhalese and English. I used to be able to read and write Tamil since it was taught as my third language in school until 9th grade. Now, all I can do is count to 10.
There are a few things that are specifically unique to Sri Lanka, such as the civil war and all the atrocities, and now the new anti-Muslim sentiment, etc. Strangely enough, I have no idea why people ever voted for the president who fled the country (or his siblings), considering they embody the worst qualities from both left-wing and right-wing politics, with government-controlled prices and populism.
This is product thinking. Let’s get deep: Story time!
I initially liked the guy but grew a bit tired of him using what could be veiled racism for views — I’m not accusing him of anything; it just felt cringy-er than I like my YouTube. The ethics are more complicated than that, but something bothered me, especially since that special episode where they sent someone physically there, let pests in the building, etc.
I couldn’t put my finger on why. I didn’t particularly appreciate using animals, but that wasn’t it. I wasn’t a fan of the tall Serbian guy and his friend: they felt like standard prankster YouTubers, and I wouldn't say I like those. It felt like Mark Rober was part of it (He’s my favorite YouTuber, like everyone here) but didn’t like it; he should have been more active but wasn’t… More on MR later. It’s relevant—I promise.
In the meantime, my partner (a medical doctor) has been watching those for a while. She loved it: administrative nightmare, people taking advantage of older people, computer glitches… there was so much schadenfreude to keep her giggling for hours after long shifts. I liked watching over her shoulder, recognizing the episode, and telling her if something good was coming (those are long).
I have this pet theory that some jobs are intensive (you work as much as you do, like clinical work for doctors, plumbers, bakers, or therapists) or extensive (you do things that work for you, like teacher, software developer!). Anyone with an intensive job has a terrible life because they have to work too much in construction. So I’m very tolerant of what you do after a shift to rebuild yourself. (And I think we, the tech community, should turn every job into an extensive one because that’s a better life).
But there still was something that bothered me. It was about how he needed the views to justify his time hacking them, and the views relied on a show that was always the same, and the poor, desperate, upset, and soon openly racist Indian “call center” operator had to be the bad guy. Having the bad guy always have the same skin color didn’t make the viewer any less problematic.
I thought about the theory of Moral luck (some people are in a position where they have to make hard choices, neither option is moral, and judging them for their worst decision without the context is complicated), but it wasn’t it…
I thought about how, after that big bust and the subsequent one, authorities arrested many people. They let most of them go because, of course, the police are deeply in the pocket of the owners that you never see in those videos, who are never really risking much. It felt performative: nothing structural happened. It also felt possibly “culturally racist”: again, good reason to suspect corruption in India, but without evidence, it still felt prejudicial. But obvious.
But then I say this video (the first two minutes, I’m waiting for my partner to come from her shift to watch it together — she’s going to love that one). Kitboga didn’t just find something better, automating him wasting time with others: I recognize that team huddled around a table. That’s a product team. It felt more like a physical product team, like what you see in Mark Rober’s video about his toy company, but suddenly it clicked:
I didn't like Kitboga videos, not just because they were ineffective, but because they couldn’t scale. He had to spend time wasting their time, “making content” to get one caller to waste his time. This video is about someone who has done intensive work until now, switching to automation and opening himself to extensive work.
This time, fighting spammers doesn't rely on at least enough of them being “minstrels” (caricatural entertaining stereotypes: the thing that led to the expression “black face”) to make “good content.” It works as a video based on the excitement around building and iterating on a product, led by data.
Well, presumably led by data: I haven’t watched beyond the second minute when he says they were tracking “EVERY click,” so my product analyst self suddenly felt very involved in that part.
That’s why I like (and I’m assuming everyone on HN likes) Mark Rober’s videos: he builds a product. There’s some story-telling, but he clearly follows the ups and downs of trying to build a systematic solution to a given problem. This is something that MR wasn't able to do in the video with spies getting inside the call center.
I sometimes struggle to explain my theory about intensive and extensive work, or what makes a company “product-driven,” and why it’s so important. You rarely have both options that are easy to compare favorably in an industry without the gap in quality being so prevalent: industrial bread vs. hand-make baker, ready-to-wear vs. bespoke fashion. But for so much software, having an industrial option is usually better because quantity has a quality of its own.
Here, Kitboga is trying to fight an industry. It doesn’t matter that he’s witty every time he’s talking to an agent; he just needs to be witty enough to edit it into his video. To fight scammers, he needs scale — a different scale than what millions of viewers can give him. This automation will allow him to waste so much scammer time that he might make the sector unprofitable. Not sure when, where, or how… (indeed, they’ll notice when they step in a maze?), but that glimpse at possible success where no one thought that was possible. Everyone who started a company knows that moment, the product-market-fit, the Road-to-Damascus glimpse:
“Are you a billionaire?
- Not yet, but soon.
- How?!
- That one guy said that I’ve made his day a little bit better.”
Seeing someone work on something for years and finally change—that’s a rare sight. I’m happy it was all filmed.
Plus, those look like horrifying UX dark patterns. I love those. Now that I’ve wasted everyone’s time with my theory, my partner is finally home: let’s watch it.
Kitboga definitely isn't using veiled racism like other scambaiters, unless you consider scambaiting itself racist to an extent.
As far as the "cannot scale" argument. His videos are educational. Most times here starts and ends his videos with a warning and a message to make sure you and your loved ones know how to spot these scammers. I for one have shared his videos with grandparents and they loved them, but were also saddened that some people do fall for these things. Since they were made aware, I would say they are 10x as safe when talking on the phone and browsing the web, maybe even to a fault since now they call me when something looks phishy... Anyways as long as his channel is growing and more people consume his content and spread awareness, it is scaling.
> I would watch a quieter, more humble Mark Rober.
There is definitely too much Californian energy there… but I have to work with guys like that, so I try to get myself used to the unjustifiable yelling and gratuitous positivity.
I’ve mentioned alternatives who I would recommend in another comment:
> * Shane Wighton of Stuff Made Here in the Pacific North West: more earnest about how hard it is to make hardware
>
> * Destin Sandlin of Smarter Everyday is the actual fun uncle, a Southern engineer to the core and a lot more earnest on screen.
>
> * Alec Watson of Technology Connections is a MidWestern fix-it-all who cares far too much about old tech
>
> * Tech Ingredients is the real deal: New Englander, no messing around, projects that are genuine breakthroughs with enough detail to reproduce in your garage
> unless you consider scambaiting itself racist to an extent
Yeah… It’s not that it is, but it’s not clear enough that it’s not. Makes me feel uncomfortable. The best explanation I have is this joke (about a different problem): https://youtu.be/nu6C2KL_S9o
> Since they were made aware,
I see the argument behind education, and it does scale in that way — I initially listed YouTuber as an extensive work because it’s not a million times harder to make 10 million views than 10 views. There’s more than one input into work.
But I don’t know how many aging people have loved ones who will show them Kitboga videos. He still interrupts scams all the time. He’s a preventative measure in a world with scammers. His mocking of them hasn’t eradicated the practice. If he traps enough of them into eternal Captchas, until the center doesn’t make enough money, then he might convince the rich owners to do something else (train AI, I guess) and make the scam centers disappear. And that feels transformative.
Essentially prank calling scammers gets old fast, and is just an avenue to make money from Youtube. Which means upping the ante to keep viewers, eventually videos reach a grey area where they get as mean as the scammers themselves.
This automated method is cool though, so it makes an interesting video. Could have done without the Kraken shilling though, they are part of the problem.
YouTubers have not made the most informed decisions about who they accept sponsor from, but compared to traditional media, they have proven very responsive to campaign from their fans accusing them of shilling the wrong brand.
FWIW, after a few videos I found Mark Rober insufferable, he seems too full of himself. I did enjoy his first glitter vs anti-package-thieves video, but not his later videos
Oh, his latest videos and the package-thieves are way less entertaining than his previous ones. There are interesting hesitations when he ponders the ethics and legality, but it’s otherwise (unfunny) schadenfreude.
I think that’s the influence of other YouTubers: he’s hanging out with the Safety Third guys, who are (as their name implies) trying to fast-run a Darwin prize. They make entertaining science-y stuff. He’s also hanging out with Mr. Beast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, which I suspect is why Mark is less fun: Jimmy has this extreme discipline of optimizing videos for views that carve the authentic excitement out to stuff cliffhangers every second instead.
For example, Mark Rober’s previous projects, like the always-on-target dart board, are much better. He’s quite smug on this one, too, but that’s his screen persona: an over-confident Californian frat-ish dude turning into “the best” uncle. He talks about this offline; it’s his way of making childish pranks fit his adult frame.
If you like the dart-board one more but thought it was too prankish, you might like Shane Wighton of Stuff Made Here in the Pacific North West: he’s more earnest about how hard it is to make hardware. There are still the occasional pranks (and the over-confidence because he’s using a robot), but there are a lot more technical details. His on-screen persona with his wife (who claims, on screen, to hate all his ideas) is not very credible, but more grown-up than Mark Rober’s Nerf gun fights.
Otherwise, Destin Sandlin of Smarter Everyday is the actual fun uncle, a Southern engineer to the core and a lot more earnest on screen. Alec Watson of Technology Connections is a MidWestern fix-it-all, who cares far too much about old tech. And finally, Tech Ingredients is the real deal: New Englander, no messing around, projects that are genuinely breakthroughs, with enough detail to reproduce in your garage.
Well, to derail this to a review of YouTubers I've seen, Destin is okay, his happy optimistic about everything attitude annoys the dark-hearted cynic in me a bit.
Technology Connections: interesting content, sometimes the humor is cringeworthy. He knows he's making a cringe joke or a very very lame pun, so he leans into it, "I know this joke isn't funny but the fact that you're aware that I'm aware that I'm making a lame joke makes it funny again ha ha ha" while my eyes roll hard, but hey maybe some people find the meta-joke (or is it a meta-meta-joke? Or am I missing his meta-meta-jokes?) hilarious and clever. Tech Ingredients is so serious and great!
Other YouTubers I enjoy are Matthias Wandel and Electroboom.
100% with you. Shane Wighton (Stuff Made Here) might be the cynic you want. He makes some cringy self-referential jokes, but he’s genuinely that one magical engineer everyone wants on his team.
He’s the only one who is an engineer first, and an entertainer… maybe?
There are a handful who I haven’t mentioned with the same personality—mostly around niche topics, like RC vehicles, though.
I’m curious what you’d think of Jay from the Plasma Channel: he clearly very personable, but his content is to the point, and he might find something major on the way.
He only gives scammers the QR code that leads into his gauntlet. Normal people shouldn't be stumbling into this, as it requires a fake QR code from a fake Bitcoin ATM receipt. This also lures the scammers in as they believe they will receive (someone else's) Bitcoin.
Scammers have recruited at least one victim to try to complete the fake withdrawal process for them. Luckily Kit and his team noticed and got her help. He was live streaming and only showed his side of the call. It has rather sad since it was clear the victim was very vulnerable (a lonely veteran with a brain injury who was being scammed for years).
sure, but you won't be scamming them, so it's all in fun troll spirit. frankly, i've met some asshats in the real world that i wouldn't mind pulling pranks like this on.
I understand your concern. kitboga goes to great lengths to ensure only scammers are harmed by his anti-scam tactics; and, while it may be theoretically possible that a scammer has brought in an unassuming victim to do this work for him, the odds are very low, sufficient that it is reasonable to believe it doesn’t happen, or is caught fast.
So this is real? I always presumed the person he's talking to in these videos was just a friend/colleague playing the part. Some of the stuff he does to them seems like it would violate international hacking laws or something.
I meant it would violate the laws in the victim's country. There are certainly laws against installing malware on someone else's machine in lots of countries.
In the beginning it seems okay, have a bunch of people pretend to be victims and waste scammers time, but later on with starting to deploy malware and zero-days, spying on people with their web cam... Just because scammers break the law doesn't mean we have to stoop to their level. Overall left a bad taste in my mouth. It had a strong smell of "ends justify the means" mentality and this is know to turn to s*t every time.
No sympathy for those scum. If it was your low-income parents being scammed of their life savings, you wouldn’t either. No one is stopping these criminals. There is no legal system to pursue them. They operate largely outside of any repercussions. No sympathy for those scum.
I would condone anything short of strangling the life out of them with one's bare hands. Clearly you've never known someone who's been preyed up on by these animals.
I've been trying to call California EDD to get some back pay for my state paid family leave. There is no option to get what I need online, I need to call in. I've had that exact thing happen twice after an hour of waiting in the queue... phone rings, goes to voicemail, full mailbox, line gets disconnected. And I have about a 1/100 rate of even getting a chance to join the queue when I call; usually I hear that the queue is too full to join at all. It's absolutely maddening and I may never get my PFL paid out properly.