[HN Gopher] YouTuber Kitboga trapped 200 scammers in an Impossib...
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YouTuber Kitboga trapped 200 scammers in an Impossible Maze [video]
Author : donpott
Score : 466 points
Date : 2023-11-03 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _" Why did you redeem it?!"_
|
| Kitboga is a youtube national treasure.
| simlevesque wrote:
| It's a satisfying feeling when good trolling is done for a good
| purpose.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| cuddlyogre wrote:
| I know so many foreign curse words thanks to him.
| pests wrote:
| His (old?) Google Play system was great. The digit at a
| specific location indicated to the fake Google Play store how
| much the redemption was worth.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| 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.
| chrisjc wrote:
| 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?
| graywh wrote:
| this wasn't the usual "pretend to be a victim" bit
| lapetitejort wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| The scammers for some reason gave the victim kitbogas number.
| I don't know why. I think kitboga is confused too.
| zerf wrote:
| 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.
| whiterock wrote:
| hilarious.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| 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!
| flerchin wrote:
| It's really funny, but I can't tell how he funneled in scammers
| only. Seems just as likely he just has poor people.
| jstanley wrote:
| The only way to receive a gift card for this website is by
| attempting to scam him.
| phantomwhiskers wrote:
| 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.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| but if you had a sample qr code (or even just the basic url?)
| you could start trolling innocents, no?
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Design it well and innocents can be identified quickly and
| directed to real people who can help them out, as what
| happened in this video at the end.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| What are the stakes? It's a website with weird captchas and
| a phone robot that puts you on hold, not a landmine.
| csours wrote:
| Probably people he scambusted, or his associates have
| scambusted.
| t-writescode wrote:
| 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.
| erikerikson wrote:
| > has poor people
|
| With $1M+ wallets? I do not think poor means what you think it
| means. Granted, his mention of that was nearer to the end of
| the video.
| modeless wrote:
| Is this one as good as the impossible password game one? It was
| genius. https://youtu.be/knhQ2f8anT8
| nogridbag wrote:
| That's definitely one of my favorites. But the video that made
| me laugh out loud the most was his collab with a cake designer:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZpkdrm-zGA
| Wissenschafter wrote:
| 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.
| starik36 wrote:
| His first ever show on KFI with the fake station manager was
| the most confusing time in my life.
| function_seven wrote:
| I delivered pizzas back when Phil was on KFI. There were _so_
| many late deliveries because I just couldn't get out of my
| car until a commercial break.
|
| RC Collins, Bud from Ojai, Margaret Gray, Bobbie Dooley, etc.
| All hilarious.
| sva_ wrote:
| The call hold line maze was great
| mschuster91 wrote:
| While I prefer Scammer Payback, this is f...ing awesome. A job
| well done.
| IngvarLynn wrote:
| It could've been funny, but every second of this video reminds me
| of my own experiences of dealing with the government services.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I love one of the top comments on the video:
|
| > 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.
| joedevon wrote:
| hahahahaha
| vsviridov wrote:
| IMO this is way better than what the other scambaiter Pierogi did
| recently. I'm refering to this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUHFpfVPUYc
|
| 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.
| 3seashells wrote:
| Why use people? All it takes Is chatgpt?
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| 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.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Meanwhile YouTube's first video recommendation is
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s23XR8JMKtA where Kitboga
| himself installs malware on a scammer's machine.
| houli wrote:
| That's not what happens. He runs his own fake ransomware on
| his own virtual machine while they are remotely viewing it.
| chairhairair wrote:
| Imagine thinking surveillance is inherently evil.
|
| Not everything is a slippery slope, it turns out. It's ok to go
| outside with your eyes open still.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| How many nuts are in this picture is the dystopia I fear
| dylan604 wrote:
| is the rodent male or female or gender fluid?
| oktwtf wrote:
| Classic scambaiting, reminds me of 419 Eater.
| binarymax wrote:
| Is this the guy who got a scammer to carve a wooden keyboard?
| Legendary
| oktwtf wrote:
| 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.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| You are correct:
|
| _The name 419 comes from "419 fraud", another name for
| advance fee fraud, and itself derived from the relevant
| section of the Nigerian criminal code._
| klyrs wrote:
| https://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm
|
| 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?
| yorwba wrote:
| If you read all the way to the end:
|
| >> 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!
|
| But yeah, John got scammed.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The "do not redeem" video is the Kitboga's gift to humanity.
|
| Scamming old people out of their retirement is the worst thing
| someone can do. I have no empathy for those scammers.
| SirMaster wrote:
| I thought a lot of them don't even know they are running scams,
| and that is all coming down from the top.
|
| They are barely paid phone workers just doing scripts and doing
| what they are told just so they can feed their families.
| packetslave wrote:
| "doing what they are told" is not an excuse if what you're
| being told to do is evil.
| reidjs wrote:
| 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.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| They are forced to become criminals and scam old people.
| Yeah sure.
| jstarfish wrote:
| 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.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| White guilt? noble savages?
|
| What are you talking about?
|
| Expressing your thoughts through racial stereotypes makes
| you look with a person with poor judgment and no common
| sense.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It is crime.
|
| 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.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| 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.
| burnerburnson wrote:
| Only on HackerNews could I find some idiot trying to drum up
| sympathy for phone scammers.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| A 20 year old failed social engineer scamming a 80 year old
| retired American veteran requires all our empathy.
| nerdo wrote:
| What a 1960's psych experiment would look like in 2023.
| Submitting to the authority of the QR code/877 number instead of
| white lab coat.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Arrogant and smug to one, a _confident man_ to another!
| netsharc wrote:
| 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...
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| They scam many many people all day every day, why wouldn't
| they get arrogant about it?
|
| your explanation seems overly complicated.
| jwilber wrote:
| I think they're speculating about the sort of person who is
| drawn to that sort of job, how they justify that line of
| work, etc.
| lstamour wrote:
| The Stanford Prison Experiment reveals a lot about decent
| people being easily manipulated - and by that I mean the
| whole thing has since been revealed as fraudulent:
| https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-
| exper...
| hattmall wrote:
| Were these studies never replicated?
| coryfklein wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Didn't they ban attempts to replicate because of
| violence?
| JaDogg wrote:
| 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.
| monadINtop wrote:
| > 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 often far to costly 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 independent narrative.
|
| And finally, how does a monarchy naturally progress to
| "diplomacy"? To my knowledge there is no single theory that
| describes 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.
| JaDogg wrote:
| [delayed]
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| No, 99.9% of them are just scum of the earth criminals. They
| don't give a shit about who they're scamming.
| ge96 wrote:
| Jim Browning (like a kitboga) too
| jrace wrote:
| I have taken quite the disadian for these scanners after the
| took advantage of my aunt.
|
| Since then when I get calls I keep them on the line to stope
| them from at least scamming one other person.
|
| I have had three on long enough to actually answer the question
| I ask
|
| "Why would you scam a poor little old lady?"
|
| All three answered the same:
|
| "You people in the west are rich and don't deserve it."
| pixl97 wrote:
| >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.
| wnevets wrote:
| Scammers vs Impossible Password Game [1] is also great to watch.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knhQ2f8anT8
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Put the fire out! You murdered the chicken!! Unbelievable. I
| almost laughed up a lung.
| quux wrote:
| Amazing
| no_time wrote:
| This is staged right? Right??
| CursedUrn wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| There are no "international hacking laws". That's why all these
| scammers operate with impunity.
| CursedUrn wrote:
| 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.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Can someone explain how the scammers are pulled in in the first
| place? That is, what's the 'funnel' for this?
|
| I get that this is amusing and a good way to waste scammers'
| time, but where did he originally find the scammers?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| They have public phone numbers they send out in spam email
| campaigns.
| iris2004 wrote:
| > 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).
| abetusk wrote:
| 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?
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWzz3NeDz3E&t=150s
| KallDrexx wrote:
| 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?
| chrisjc wrote:
| 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.
| dvaletin wrote:
| 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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!
| cedws wrote:
| If you browse the Internet without an ad blocker for a while
| you'll find all sorts.
| BillSaysThis wrote:
| This. Is. Awesome!
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| 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.
| dave1010uk wrote:
| What OS and browser are you using? Give me a couple of minutes
| and I'll get ChatGPT to write aa script that does it for you.
| gryn wrote:
| I don't know if you're being satiric about it but I found
| your reply hilarious.
|
| maybe the captcha was made with chatGPT to begin with.
|
| AIs creating jobs for AIs to keep (server) employment at 100%
| switchbak wrote:
| And that's the real reason we need fusion power. To power
| all the incredibly dumb shit that we layer on top of other
| layers of dumb.
|
| If only we had an AI that could clean all of that up for
| us. Sadly, I'm only half joking. I need a beer.
| blt wrote:
| There is no training data ;)
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Then they will brick my Windows laptop and throw me in jail
| for Illegal Captcha Circumvention and Resisting Verification!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If you have multiple services that are suspicious of your CC
| transactions, someone might be trying to rob you.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| 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!
| boneitis wrote:
| 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.
| Wissenschafter wrote:
| I've had GPT pro since it was first available and have not
| once had to do a CAPTCHA to use it, first time I'm hearing
| about this actually.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Congrats, you are a good person with high social rating,
| keep at it!
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| It's country dependent. When I've been around in Europe, I
| barely see it. As soon as I go to South America, captchas
| everywhere.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > It's pretty wild that my $20 subscription earns me a long
| string of puzzles.
|
| Well that GPT5 isn't gonna train itself
| asddubs wrote:
| Makes me think of this video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVFYFr4Vy8I
| DrawTR wrote:
| Makes me think of this one: https://youtu.be/WqnXp6Saa8Y
| dalmo3 wrote:
| I'm also cancelling my Proton VPN subscription after being
| captcha-ed for minutes IN THE DESKTOP APP.
| fmx wrote:
| 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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| 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.
| HansHamster wrote:
| 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"
| S201 wrote:
| 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.
| 015a wrote:
| I cancelled my ChatGPT+ subscription only because of their
| sign-in and captcha hell.
| michael_vo wrote:
| There should be a software product that protects our elderly by
| watching their bank accounts and listens to their phone calls.
|
| It's so clearly a scam.
| HappyTortoise wrote:
| 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.
| hiatus wrote:
| 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.
| libele wrote:
| or just do what my parents did: while the old folks are at
| their most vulnerable, use your cute children to gain their
| confidence and trick them into signing all of their assets
| over to you. take advantage of struggling family members by
| writing them out of the inheritance that was intended for the
| whole family. once the new will has been signed and notorized
| you can gradually taper off nursing home visits, sit back and
| wait for them to die.
| corbezzoli wrote:
| 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.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Can these people actually be this stupid? I am having a hard time
| believing it. I would expect scammers to be more aware of the
| possibility of deceitful behavior by others. Incredible if true,
| but hard to believe...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| This is basically what surfing the web with a bad IP reputation
| is like. Captcha upon captcha.
|
| It's also basically what dealing with a fin tech startup is
| like, especially in the crypto adjacent space. Getting a hold
| of a person is basically impossible.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| If they were that smart, they would have real jobs
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, I do support work and work with a lot of large
| multinationals... being smart is not required it seems. And
| those are people with legit job titles.
| themagician wrote:
| It depends. A lot of these scammers are extremely desperate.
| Some are forced into it. For others it's just an office job
| like any other.
|
| Some firms actually do both legitimate support/customer service
| work and scamming side by side. I've called legit companies
| support lines before and the person picking up starts off doing
| some scam and them I'm like, "I thought this was Brand X," and
| they switch, "Oh yes, sorry about that. What was your order
| number?" That's how bad it's gotten.
| corbezzoli wrote:
| > Some are forced into it.
|
| Judging by the calls I hear, I don't give them that benefit
| at all. They sound pretty happy to scam the elderly.
|
| Maybe as a first-responder that could work, but if you're
| talking to an elderly and convincing them to hand over
| hundreds or thousands of dollars, you do not have my
| sympathy.
| esrauch wrote:
| I've been in the phone system for multiple hours with Comcast
| just to try to get my service activated, so it doesn't seem
| that inherently ridiculous that one hour with a small company
| support would result in an unfortunate disconnect at the end.
| hateful wrote:
| The further I get into the video (I'm not quite done yet), the
| more I'm convinced that most of the people calling aren't
| actually scammers, but are people that have been scammed by the
| scammer to call to get their bitcoin.
|
| As if they've hijacked the wrong side of scam.
| netsharc wrote:
| I saw your comment while watching the video, you make me I
| wonder the same thing. Especially if the accent sounds
| Eastern European or British and not the typical accent of
| these scammers...
| netsharc wrote:
| The cleverer scammers, or ones who think "This is bullshit"
| don't make it into the video...
|
| I wonder if someone could do a "background check" on the domain
| name of the maze website and figure out that it must be a
| trap...
| sumedh wrote:
| > I wonder if someone could do a "background check" on the
| domain name
|
| How is that going to help, pretty sure Kitboga would have
| enabled domain privacy.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Not much sympathy for these scammers but I do wonder how
| desperate some of them have to be to waste so much time on a
| couple hundred bitcoin max.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Sunk costs can be pretty real with these things. It's something
| scammers use quite often too.
| DeRock wrote:
| "A couple hundred bitcoin" is worth around $7,000,000 USD
| Ancalagon wrote:
| A couple hundred [dollars] Bitcoin
| l0b0 wrote:
| That should be either "A couple hundred dollars' _worth of_
| Bitcoin " or simply "A couple hundred dollars".
| mhitza wrote:
| 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.
| wnevets wrote:
| > 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.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| That couple hundred may be a week or more salary, depending on
| where they live.
| chedabob wrote:
| 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.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| > Considering a lot of these scams originate from countries
| with low wages
|
| Is it a faux pas to say the truth, which is Calcutta ?
| bagels wrote:
| Calcutta is not a country, but many of them are located in
| in India or Bangladesh.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| I'm very much aware of the fact that Calcutta is a city.
| The city where most online scammers originate from. Most
| is the right word, not many.
| jen729w wrote:
| I'd work for a couple of days for $11k and I live in
| Australia!
| josu wrote:
| >low wages and high unemployment
|
| Low wages sure, but high unemployment is not correct. Most
| scammers seem to be based in India where unemployment is
| around 3%.
| sumedh wrote:
| The low wages are not enough to live a meaningful life.
| bagels wrote:
| A couple hundred bitcoin? That is a substantial amount of
| money.
| Clubber wrote:
| The owners of the companies that employe these people can make
| millions a year.
| abledon wrote:
| The next version of this maze in say, 2025, when AI is even more
| crazy... will be so beleivable.
| rietta wrote:
| Must be a tough balance. By posting this video he blows this
| process since the scammers will now know the details.
| RALaBarge wrote:
| 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.
| sumedh wrote:
| > Scammers do not have a shared consciousness
|
| They do have whatsapp group chats though.
| chrisjc wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evlFPmy-4lU
| rpmisms wrote:
| 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.
| KingGeedorah wrote:
| Really, never would have thought he was a programmer.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| 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
| JaDogg wrote:
| CSS is harder indeed.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| I'd rather do assembler than CSS.
| irrational wrote:
| You only say that because you have spent more time in
| assembler (I presume). I've spent enough time doing CSS
| that I find it to be pretty easy.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| I have about equal time doing both. Still rather do
| assembler. Assembler is outstandingly deterministic. CSS
| feels like I'm fighting Microsoft Word.
| ttoinou wrote:
| In the 2000s CSS used to be more messy, now it's all
| standardized across browsers, no ? Seems much easier
| rpmisms wrote:
| Assembler does what you tell it. CSS is like trying to
| build a pile of angry turtles.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| He shows code in the streams all the time.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Mostly UI, but he can write some decent JS.
| bertil wrote:
| _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.
| netsharc wrote:
| 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
| bertil wrote:
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| 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.
| bertil wrote:
| 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.
| pests wrote:
| > Jimmy has this extreme discipline of optimizing videos
| for views that carve the authentic excitement out to stuff
| cliffhangers every second instead.
|
| Remind's me of the Patrick's long-standing urge for Colin
| to improve pricing / not using picodollars on Tarsnap.
|
| > His on-screen persona with his wife [...] is not very
| credible
|
| Love Stuff Made Here. I find those segments so awkward but
| also very endearing. Cringe levels of forced acting... but
| it has grown to work.
|
| Some other interesting builders:
|
| Imphenzia - rocket experiments, nozzle design
|
| Jeremy Fielding - robotics, motors, general engineering
|
| styropyro - lasers, optics
|
| The Thought Emporium - genetic engineering, gene splicing,
| dna editing, etc
|
| rctestflight - rc drones, airplanes, submarines, boats
|
| Clickspring - antikythera mechanism, watchmaking
|
| French Guy Cooking - unique mix of food and diy engineering
| (never seen a workshop and kitchen combined before)
| kacesensitive wrote:
| I would watch a quieter, more humble Mark Rober.
|
| 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.
| bertil wrote:
| > 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.
| phatfish wrote:
| 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.
| naet wrote:
| 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.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| I've had this happen to me with a bank before! It was nuts.
| Eventually I DM'd their twitter account and got the customer
| service I needed.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| 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.
| ilamont wrote:
| > 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.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| You have to accept that they might actually cancel the
| account, and deal with the inconvenience of actually
| switching (which may be worth it anyway).
| pests wrote:
| 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.
| Miserlou57 wrote:
| 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
| jf wrote:
| Regarding your issues with CA EDD: Call the office of your
| California state assembly representative and ask for their
| help.
| naet wrote:
| 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.
| verve_rat wrote:
| Can you post them a letter?
| rvba wrote:
| The worst is that there are multiple startups that offer a
| "call back" service.
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| 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.
| dap wrote:
| 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.
| JaDogg wrote:
| Kudos to Kitboga!
|
| 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.
| montag wrote:
| 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.
| JaDogg wrote:
| I agree. Extracting individuals from this mindset requires
| significant effort. -- this applies to me too.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I literally can't think of anything funnier I've seen in my life.
| digital-cygnet wrote:
| 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
| nickphx wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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!
| johnyzee wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Lenny:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSoOrlh5i1k
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/comments/5lcfwq/lennys_his...
|
| Also, I highly recommend the movie, "Sorry to Bother You":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry_to_Bother_You
|
| SORRY TO BOTHER YOU | Official Trailer:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enH3xA4mYcY
|
| With LaKeith Stanfield playing Cash, and David Cross playing
| Cash's "white voice"!
|
| The Art Of The White Voice by David Cross and Patton Oswalt
| (Sorry to Bother You):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxZt3sD3rzo
|
| Watch Lakeith Stanfield Use His 'White Voice' in 'Sorry to
| Bother You' | Anatomy of a Scene:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY9RQFX28j0
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| 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.)
| johnyzee wrote:
| He should try to make the scammers pay a small fee for 'premium
| support'.
| sumedh wrote:
| How are they going to pay the fee?
| l0b0 wrote:
| The really sad part is how many of these you'd encounter
| regularly when talking to "real" companies:
|
| - Voice deliberately downsampled to the point where it's like
| listening to a walkie-talkie on a propeller plane.
|
| - Insanely terrible pause "music", at full volume, downsampled
| and volume-boosted to the point where it physically hurts.
|
| - Random disconnects.
|
| - Circular redirects.
|
| And this is while being polite and patient with the poor person
| working for these assholes all day.
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