The Rise of Scambaiting: Fighting Cyber Fraud Operations

Scambaiters, like Jim Browning, combat multimillion-dollar scams by leveraging technology and collaboration with law enforcement.

### The Rise of Scams: Understanding the Tactics and Responses in a Digital Age
* 💻 "Anyone, no matter their background or education level, can fall for a scam, highlighting the **global crisis of cyber-related criminal activity**."
* 🧠 Scammers employ masterful psychological techniques, **building trust with victims** until they realize they've **lost everything**, as evidenced by the **over $5 billion lost in crypto-related fraud** in the US last year.
* 🚨 Vigilantes like scambaiters work to disrupt these scams, using tactics such as **wasting scammers' time** and **gathering valuable information for law enforcement to take action**.
* 🎭 Jim Browning, a prominent figure in scambaiting, utilizes his **software engineering background** to reverse connections and gather intelligence on scammers, often **confronting them directly**.
* 🌍 The operations of these scams are often international, with scammers operating from locations like **Dubai**, exploiting **vulnerable workers from third-world countries**.
* 💰 Victims often lose significant amounts of money, with one individual reporting a loss of **6.6 million Hong Kong dollars (approximately $800,000)**, illustrating the **devastating impact of these scams**.
* 🔍 Despite efforts to expose and shut down these operations, the challenge remains immense, with many victims feeling **hopeless about recovering their lost funds**.
* 🛡 The future of combating scams may rely on **collective efforts and technological advancements**, as scambaiters and investigators collaborate to develop tools that **prevent scammers from connecting to potential victims**.

I've always said anyone, no matter their background, who they are, or their education level, can fall for a scam. We're facing an unprecedented crisis worldwide of cyber-related criminal activity, targeting all sorts of people from every society.

What we know about these scams is that they employ masterful psychological techniques against their victims. They build a relationship with you, and eventually, you realize you've lost all your money

and you'll never get it back. I never thought I would be vulnerable to a scam. It ruined me, and I didn't have a good explanation for it. Last year in the US alone, people lost over $5 billion in crypto-related fraud.

Most of the money lost in the US is through crypto scams. If we work with a scam baiter who can tell us where an operation is, we're going to raid it with a SWAT team. Go, go.

Let's see what they're up to. Who gave you this number? Okay. Years ago, I was scrolling through YouTube and saw a clip from, "Hello, this is Lenny!" It was an elderly gentleman who was messing

with various marketing phone calls. He had 16 stock phrases to respond with whenever a telemarketer paused.  "When was the last time you turned on your computer? Oh, sorry. I can barely hear you."

The sentences are so generic that telemarketers stay on the phone and think they're actually talking to a real person. Yes, yes. But it's actually a chatbot. Okay, can you get next to the computer now and turn it on?

Well, that does sound good. I mean, you have been very patient with an old man here. But with modern-day scambaiting, it's a bit more complicated. Hello, hello, hello? Yes, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.

The goal is almost like if you were fishing; you're baiting your hook to go after a particular type of fish, or in this case, a particular type of scam. I'm giving it to you for your wedding. I get it.

So once I say, 'change my voice,' and I sound like an older gentleman, I do anything that I can to convince them that I am falling for their scam. I'm doing it because you told me, so I can waste their time. I unplugged the computer.

That way the transfer won't go through, right? No, no, no, no! We're kind of constantly trying to find new ways to do this. We have something that we call the gauntlet or the maze, because scammers often want Bitcoin,

and they ask you to go to a Bitcoin ATM. Once you insert cash, you can send money directly to their wallet. At the end, they ask you for a receipt. It typically has a QR code. The scammers want a picture of that receipt.

Well, my receipt takes them to my fake crypto exchange, and they get trapped in a maze where they have to sign up for an account, and then they have to prove they're human by solving math problems, and call a 1-800 number in which they wait on hold

for hours and talk to fake representatives. Welcome to the Easy Send automated system. This isn't just one scammer; it's hundreds of scammers. I think it's wasted somewhere around 94 days of the scammers' time,

essentially without me even... Like, there's probably a scammer or two in there right now trying to figure out where their money is and why they haven't gotten it yet. So Kitboga alone has hundreds of millions of views.

That's a lot more than the government campaign videos. Boys, I don't give a damn. I'm just gonna go straight through the door and talk to the guard. There's been a kind of shift in how these YouTube vigilantes act.

You get the sense that there's a real battle to dismantle the fraud operations. It started to shift from just wasting time to collecting information valuable for fraud professionals and law enforcement to take action on. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much.

You're welcome. No, that's the least we can do. All right, this is a victory. And there's one vigilante who's really leading the charge here. I can see that the scammers still have access

to your computer. This guy is revered by fellow scambaiters and he's even been called the godfather of scambaiting. Hello? Hello. Hello. Yeah, hi, sir. My name is Carolina Fernandes.

I am calling you from Microsoft. Oh, hi, Priya. Who are you? My name is Jim Browning, or at least that's my stage name. It's what I use on YouTube. And the reason why I use a fake name

is because I disrupt multimillion-dollar scams. In short, I hate scammers. And quite a long time ago, I decided, "Right, I'm going to try and do something about it myself. I know about computers, I know about networks,

and maybe I could put that to use. So this person's phoning the UK as well, and if I dial zero with that, I should be able to listen into it. Now, you said you have not used this card anywhere online today

in the morning, right? That is correct. Then it means that you are being compromised. So scams often involve the scammer asking to connect to your computer, and then help you fix something. What they're particularly interested in, depending on the scam,

is how much money you've got in your online bank account. They will tell you you need to fill in a form or you need to reclaim your money by typing this. They do not make it clear that what you're actually doing is giving them access

to your computer. The thing is, Jim Browning has a background as a software engineer, and so what he can do is he can reverse that connection so he'll have access to their computer. I can see their webcams and CCTV.

I can see the calling system that they're using to make their phone calls. You can hear what the victim hears.  There's a fraud alert on your account at this time, so we have to work on it accordingly. That's what you called for.

The police generally cannot do that. So that's really how all of this starts. This side, Mark Anderson. I'm calling you from Windows. This call is regarding your computer, ma'am. The victims are very rarely in the same country

as the scammers, and that is to the advantage of the scammers. Unlike law enforcement, these vigilantes don't deal with any of the red tape when they're fighting these international criminals. You need all sorts of court orders to look at a PC,

which isn't yours, but I can, let's just say, access things that police couldn't to help them along with their job. And I know that police services throughout the world in other countries have made great use of what I've given to them.

I do confront scammers directly. You're lying about that. What's going on here? And I've asked them that question loads of times, "Why do you do this? Are you proud of what you do? Why are you trying to defraud people?"

But I already know what the answer is because the answer is always, although they will never admit it, greed. My name is Beard, and I've come to Dubai to change this life I've had. We had this whole image about Dubai

to be the land of opportunity. So we saved some money for me to come to Dubai. And when I came, reality hit so hard, and it turned out that you can't find a job easily. Eventually, I heard about an advertising job.

We got there, someone set us up on computers, and told us we were hired. That's it. The place was literally in the desert, on a highway far away from the city. We needed permission to leave the building. We were supposed to live there.

It turns out it wasn't an advertising job. So here is the office; you can see the computers, the mobile phones. The guy told us to just chat with these people who are texting, and be nice to them. And we were supposed to do that for 13 hours a day

to convince them that we are trustworthy. I was pretending to be a very nice-looking, easy-on-the-eyes Ukrainian girl. Sample script, open. Today, the weather is a little cold here. I wish you were here to warm me up.

I would like to meet you in person. You seem to be a nice person, and you are so smart. They gave me a set of photos to send to the victims to convince them that I'm this girl. But that wasn't the twist.

The twist was that the girl actually exists, and there are more than one. Ah, okay, okay, good, good, nice. I called you to see your face.
I'm not working right now. Whenever a victim decides,
"Hey, I want to see you,

you're so beautiful, I
need to talk to you," we take the phone to
the model and tell her, "Hey, this guy wants to talk to you. Here's his name. Say this or that." Nice to see you. I will
message you on WhatsApp.

Okay? Okay, thank you, bye bye, gracias. Then we start slowly but surely introducing the cryptocurrency, their fake cryptocurrency. We answer them. We know that the actors behind this massive
national security issue are organized criminals. They are known criminals,

known gangsters who have been
sanctioned by the United States. It's only growing and it's
only becoming more entrenched, and that's because they've
specifically chosen locations where they can continue
to do their dirty business without government interference.

A lot of Chinese criminal syndicates used to operate in Southeast
Asia, and they still do, but there's been a crackdown in that region, and they've started to take advantage of other regions and expand. So we've seen some of their
operations expanding in Africa

and also in the UAE. One of the reasons why
Dubai is so attractive is that the whole city
kind of runs on cheap labor that comes from West
Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, who can easily get a visa, and then start working
on construction sites.

or your everyday service job. After a week of my arrival, it was beyond obvious it was a scam. It was just morally wrong. I didn't feel it was right to stay there, even though I would probably end up homeless.

I didn't have any goals. I didn't have any motives. I just wanted it to stop. I knew the right person to contact. I was reached out to by a guy who called himself Beard. It's a fake name, but he, at that stage, couldn't trust me,

and I didn't know I could trust him either. Almost every day I talked to him, it was just, "Be safe."  "You don't have to do this if you feel in danger. This is a very risky job."

If they'd caught him doing this, he knew he was likely to be punished severely, if not killed. This criminal corporation that employs these people runs no differently than any other corporation in the world. People get promoted. They have an HR department,

they have sales and marketing. So it really is a criminal corporation that uses all the same strategies as a legitimate corporation. It's like clockwork. They don't stop. They just have people running 13 hours a day,

two shifts covering 24 hours, seven days a week. Thousands of workers. The recruiters actually reach out to people who are not UAE residents, mostly from India or North Africa. They avoided hiring anyone native to, or from the Gulf cities.

because they can get them in trouble. People from different countries, they don't care. They can just fire us or shove us somewhere in the desert where no one can ask or know where we are. They're taking advantage of all these people from third-world countries.

because a job is everything to them. They're sending a few hundred dollars back to their families every month, and that's a lot more than what they were doing before. $600 if you just got on the computers and talked; $700 to $800 if I got a single victim to actually invest.

$1,000 if I got three victims, and so on and so forth. And when they become good at scamming and they start to make serious money for their bosses, they get promoted, and, of course, it results in the operation growing in size and scope.

In a single month, they can make up to $100 million. It's just beyond belief. When Beard called me, I actually got him to run a few commands. He went around when the room was quiet, and he typed certain things

and that downloaded something that gave me remote access to it. So this is the Rahaba Residence. I can look at the wireless networks around that building, and with a little bit of Google's API technology, I verified that this is where Beard said the building was.

You can see here on the left, there are applications which have Chinese characters, and so on. Although the vast majority of the workers weren't Chinese, the people who actually run the crypto scams are gangs from China. And if you go into Google Earth,

About half the buildings were being used for the scams, and I guess one of the Chinese gangs must have commissioned a mobile communications van just to carry the traffic they were using. When the victims made an account on their platform,

and bought their first batch of cryptocurrency, the bosses of the place, the Chinese, he just took control from his computer. It was called Yomigt. Hello, everyone. I'm the manager of Yomigt. Nice to meet you guys.

Here I'm going to share how Yomigt works, and how to make money. The application name or website doesn't matter. They all did the same sort of thing. If you put money into this app, it would eventually look as if it's making lots

and lots of money. Thus, seizing every opportunity to buy low and sell high with timely attacks. If it looks too good to be true, if they're promising you definite returns, that should be a red flag for a scam. It was a big transitional period.

Just a reset for myself personally. When you are married for that long, I think you forget what it was like to be single. I was sitting there for hours and hours and hours thinking about what I was going to be doing with my life.

I was really just looking for an opportunity to keep myself busy. The first one was Jenny Ying, and she was from the UK, and she contacted me via WhatsApp. I didn't talk to her for very long before she handed me over to someone called Janice.

who went by the hashtag #JaniceTheReceptionist. Now, Janice was really the person that I spent most of my time with. She said, "You would need to invest your money." And at the time, it was about $200 Hong Kong.

Do the trades, and do the training with us, and then we will provide you $290 back at the end of the training exercise, which was like a three-step task that I completed. They sent me confirmation to my Standard Chartered bank account here in Hong Kong

that I'd got $290 Hong Kong back. So I felt pretty positive about those tasks up to this point. They were saying to me then, "Well, that was a fairly simple example of what you could do. Would you like to learn more?"

That's when I probably made the first of my many mistakes in this process. I clicked on the most expensive one, which was $38,000 Hong Kong, and they would send back to me $42,000 Hong Kong dollars. I didn't know the person,

but I transferred the money out of my bank to their bank account. She said my account was now set up, and I could go into the trading system, and we did the same three or four steps of Bitcoin trading. The tickets that they sent you to do the trades

were quite complicated and quite difficult to read. And now, if you don't mind, we're going to get to the news. Adult, today, in former president... I found that I was making errors there, and if you made an error in any of them,

Then the whole system collapsed. They got quite upset and said, "I'll allow you, because you're new to the system, to make that one mistake, but in order for us to keep trading, you're going to have to do another transaction of 38,500."

But again, your money would be safe. It would accumulate, and then you'd be able to withdraw it without any issue." I mean, this was a period of only three weeks, but it was a really intense three weeks, and I pretty much traded every single day to try

and get my money back out of this system. I didn't think I wouldn't get it back. I really felt that I could do this. I could win. I lost, I think it was 6.6 million Hong Kong dollars,

about 800,000 US dollars in total. The level of despair is really hard to look away from, and the desperate conditions that people find themselves in, and to know that people are killing themselves over this drives me every day—that there has to be something better.

What we know with regard to these scams is that they are employing masterful psychological techniques against their victims. These people are working 24/7 to figure out how to take your money, and you are a trusting human who wants to believe the best in everybody.

And that doesn't make you dumb; that makes you vulnerable to this type of manipulation. I lost my flat because I didn't have any money to make the payment. I called my mom, and she sent me some money to help me get through the next few months.

And then I was forced to sell assets that I had just to keep going. I felt embarrassed that I'd made such a stupid mistake. When you have an account that has that much money in it, to see that effectively being gambled

over a three-week period to be now negative was shocking. I was very depressed, and yeah, I was pretty messed up. The reality, when I get these emails from victims, these victims are saying things like, "What's my next step?

How can I recover this money?" And they don't realize the truth of the matter is that money is gone. And the best thing that those victims can do for themselves is to put that in the rearview mirror, and to start thinking about the recovery process

of what happens next. The police said to me that they would pursue the companies and the banks in Hong Kong, and talk to those owners of those bank accounts, and do their investigation, but I put my statement in and have only had one phone call in the last seven months.

I started to reach out to some investigators, and that's when I contacted Ken Gamble and IFW. We had a complaint from a victim in Hong Kong. He's a British Australian. Now, it's a bit like the old kidnapping cases.

Whenever there was someone kidnapped, and there's a ransom being demanded, we always try to keep that kidnapper on the line because while we're communicating, we have a chance of tracking them. So there's Janice the receptionist, Donald the teacher,

And Duke, who introduced himself as the CFO, said, "Because the amount of money in your account was so large, I'm going to personally work with you to get that withdrawal completed." He gave me all sorts of guarantees.

He would even give me a letter of guarantee. So I signed it, and then Ken embedded a trace into that form and sent it back to Duke. We got a trace link and an IP address for the first time.

The trace address was in Dubai. I had imagined they were in Hong Kong. I was shocked.  The reason I'm calling is, I don't know if you're aware, but the whole thing is a scam.

We were introduced to Jim a while ago by a mutual acquaintance, who suggested we work together. When we tracked this scam to Dubai, we shared the IP address with Jim. He called me back.

He said, "Did I give you this IP address?" I said, "No, I've just given it to you." He said, "Because that's the same group I'm monitoring." So Jim was monitoring the same syndicate

that defrauded our client in Hong Kong. That's when our two investigations converged. I canceled the 600-euro transaction. He already had inside knowledge of this operation. The next step is to send people on the ground.

To physically inspect that operation, conduct covert surveillance, and start building a picture of what we're up against. We had an informant go inside that building, and we've got footage inside. We've been able to establish exactly what they're doing.

Because IFW Global liaises with the local police, for me, this was the way to try to get something done about the scam. Initially, their view was that the police are quite keen on doing something about this. We gave them an extensive briefing

on a very large syndicate operating right under their nose in Dubai, showing them this footage that we have, showing them the evidence that we've gathered, requesting that we collaborate with law enforcement in order to raid and bring down this operation.

But actually, what transpired was that things went very quiet. Because it had gone quiet, there was nothing more to be done other than at least expose the operation in the hope that they would close it down. This is undercover filming in a pig butchering scam.

The people in this office are pretending to be glamorous models in the hope that they can steal money from people all over the world. But thanks to an insider risking his life taking these pictures, we're able to see how their scam operates.

And if you ever wondered why people are convinced by scams like this, take a look at this footage. To see it at scale, and yet no one's looking at them... has been chosen because it's out of—I find it highly unlikely.

that I will see any of my money ever again. And we know there are thousands and millions of victims out there. I'm a small fish in a very big pond. So I hope me speaking up will help change something,

and make more people aware. That would be a great outcome. Eventually, the police did raid those offices. Footage shows thousands of people coming out of those buildings. Hopefully, the top people, who seem to be part of a Chinese gang,

will be put behind bars for a long time because they have gotten away with literally millions from that scam. Scambaiters do this big reveal. They publish videos showing how that specific operation works, and then they shut it down.

And it's kind of cool to see, but the main concern for a lot of scambaiters isn't just working with law enforcement; they also need views. And one of the ways they do that is by humiliating scammers.

So it's also kind of a lawless Wild West. They can pick and choose who they attack. So that I think is a bit worrisome sometimes. Whether you get scammed or not, whether you hang up the phone or not,

whether you go to the bank or not, they're still there. Just giving people tips about red flags just feels like it's not enough anymore. I think it's all hands on deck right now. We need to keep talking about this.

Anyone who can do anything to make this more difficult for scammers to do their dirty work is welcome. So we developed the world's first software to stop scammers from ever connecting to your device. There are a lot of businesses who could take a closer look

at what they are enabling on their platforms. There are more resources that could be put on it. Certainly, whenever scams run, there's a whole load of different facets to an organization. Likewise, scambaiters, if you're going to really defeat scams,

Inside the Shadowy World of Professional Scambaiting | Bloomberg Investigates

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Bloomberg Originals

The global crisis of cybercrime and its psychological impact

Anyone can be a victim of scams, regardless of background or education.

Scammers use psychological techniques to build relationships with victims before defrauding them.

Crypto scams account for significant financial losses in the US.

Law enforcement collaborates with scam baiters to raid fraudulent operations.

Scambaiters use various techniques, such as impersonating elderly people or creating elaborate mazes to waste scammers' time.

The goal is to lure scammers and waste their time and resources.

Scambaiters create complex scenarios (gauntlets or mazes) to trap scammers.

These mazes involve tasks like account creation, solving math problems, and long phone holds.

Scambaiting can significantly waste scammers' time (e.g., 94 days).

The evolution of scambaiting and its impact

Scambaiting has shifted from time-wasting to information gathering for law enforcement.

Jim Browning, a prominent scambaiter, disrupts multimillion-dollar scams.

He uses his technical skills to gain access to scammers' computers.

Scammers often try to gain access to victims' bank accounts.

Scambaiters overcome jurisdictional limitations faced by law enforcement.

Jim Browning confronts scammers directly and explores their motivations.

An individual, Beard, describes working in a Dubai-based scam operation.

Workers were tasked with convincing victims of their trustworthiness.

Workers impersonated models and used provided photos to build trust.

Actual models were used for video calls to further enhance credibility.

The operation involved organized criminals and known gangsters.

The global reach and impact of organized crime

Criminal syndicates exploit regions with less government oversight.

Dubai's reliance on cheap labor makes it attractive to criminal operations.

Beard's experience highlights the moral dilemmas faced by those involved.

The risks involved in exposing the operation are emphasized.

The criminal organization is structured similarly to a legitimate corporation.

The operation targets non-UAE residents for recruitment.

The vulnerability of workers from third-world countries is highlighted.

Workers' compensation is tied to their success in scamming victims.

Exposing and dismantling the Dubai scam operation

Beard provided remote access to investigators, enabling the identification of the location.

Technological tools were used to verify the location and gather evidence.

The operation was linked to Chinese criminal gangs.

The scale of the operation is highlighted, with many buildings involved.

The inner workings of the scam platform are revealed.

A victim's perspective on a Hong Kong crypto scam

A victim describes their experience with a Hong Kong-based crypto scam.

The victim's interaction with multiple scammers is detailed.

Initial small-scale transactions seemed legitimate.

The victim made a significant investment, losing a substantial amount of money.

The scammers used pressure tactics to encourage further investment.

The victim lost a total of 6.6 million Hong Kong dollars.

The psychological impact on victims is emphasized.

The victim's financial and emotional distress is described.

The victim's advice to other victims is to focus on recovery.

The victim's experience with law enforcement is described.

The victim's collaboration with investigators is detailed.

International collaboration to combat the scam

Investigators used similar techniques to those used in kidnapping cases.

Investigators obtained an IP address through a trace embedded in a document.

The IP address led to Dubai, not Hong Kong as initially suspected.

Jim Browning was already monitoring the same syndicate.

The plan involved sending people to Dubai for physical surveillance.

Footage from inside the building provided crucial evidence.

Collaboration with local police was attempted but proved unsuccessful.

Undercover footage reveals the scale and methods of the scam.

The victim expresses hope for change and increased awareness.

The police eventually raided the offices, leading to potential arrests.

Scambaiters' actions, including humiliation of scammers, are discussed.

The need for a multi-faceted approach to combatting scams is emphasized.

The development of software to prevent scammer access to devices is mentioned.

Collaboration among individuals and organizations is crucial.