Scamming the scammers

Border Patrol is calling: A drug cartel has your bank information, so you need to transfer all your money to a safe Bitcoin account—right now!

Millions of people will be familiar with calls like this, in which scammers, often in other countries, use threats or promises to rob you. In 2023, individuals and businesses lost an estimated $485 billion to fraud schemes, according to Nasdaq's Global Financial Crime Report.

Law enforcement will only do so much to recover losses. That is why some online streamers are taking matters into their own hands. And they have become famous for fighting back.

Endless Thread's Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson explore the complicated, criminal world of scambaiters.

Show notes:

This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Ben Brock Johnson: Amory, I want to introduce you to a guy I know.

Amory Sivertson: Is his name Ted? I feel like every story you tell, there's a guy named Ted or Gary. Or? That's really it. Ted and Gary are your boys.

Ben: We could call him Ted. I was gonna call him Charles.

Charles (not his real name): I live in Massachusetts, and what I do is I'm a consultant and trainer around governance and social change kind of related things.

Ben: And we're neighbors. 

Charles: And, yeah, you and I are neighbors.

Amory: I'll be honest, he doesn't sound all that thrilled to be your neighbor.

Ben: I know! He is, though! I swear! We're pretty close. We serve on some neighborhood committees together. I think, if he sounds a little rueful at first, it's more the story he's about to tell. About something that happened to him over the course of five or six crazy days in the summer of 2021. The nature of which is also why we're not gonna use his real name. Because, well…

Ben: What has been the personal fallout for you? 

Charles: Embarrassment. You know, it's not something I go around telling people, Hey, I was so stupid.

Amory: Ruh-roh.

Ben: Just wait.

Charles: I got a call. They identified themselves as, what was it? I guess Border Patrol.

Amory: Border Patrol is calling someone in Massachusetts. This cannot be good.

Ben: Yeah, and the person on the phone launches right into this intense story. They say, Charles, some drug dealers have been caught at the Texas-Mexico border with a package. And your name is all over this package. And somehow, these drug dealers, they've got your identity.

Charles: They're like, Don't tell anybody about this because they've got, you know, they've got your information about your bank accounts. So you need to take your money out of your accounts and put them in a safe place.

Amory: I think I know where this could be going.

Ben: And what's weird about this, for Charles, is that it seems wild and intense but also very real. And it's going at breakneck speed. These border control guys are coming hot and heavy.

Charles: You know, they switched phones, like they would say, OK, here, talk to this guy. And the guy would identify himself, I'm so and so, blah, blah, blah. And they identified some U.S. Marshal. And I did actually look him up, and yeah, there was his name. So it all sounded legitimate, serious.

Ben: So, Charles starts doing what they tell him. And they tell him to do things immediately.

Ben: Did you just do it through ATMs? 

Charles: No, I walked into a bank and withdrew a lot of money. And while I was doing that, yes, I was on the phone with them and they were telling me what to say, what not to say. You know, I had to be real careful about how I communicated so as not to sort of make the bank folks suspicious.

Amory: I can just picture that. I'm seeing Charles in my head going around and feeling this sweaty urgency, and I just want to like, reach into the past and be like, no, no, let me carry you away from this situation.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. So first, Charles goes into several bank branches while on the phone with these guys who say they're from Border Patrol and are talking to him through his earbuds while he's at the bank. And the next step in the process is that Charles has to race all over the state of Massachusetts depositing the money he just took out of the bank into Bitcoin ATMs.

Amory: And he can't tell anyone about this, like he can't find a bank teller? I guess I don't fully understand why this has to be so clandestine.

Ben: Yeah. They say…

Charles: Don't tell anybody because, you know, they are listening to you.

Amory: OK, vague statement here from the supposed Border Patrol, but the idea is that the drug dealers have stolen the identity of Charles. And in order to protect his bank accounts, he has to empty his funds from the bank accounts and put all the money into Bitcoin ATMs, like, a special Bitcoin wallet?

Ben: Correct.

Amory: How much money are we talking?

Ben: Charles?

Charles: $60,000.

Amory: That is more than I was expecting.

Ben: Yeah. And Charles has now done everything the Border Patrol and the Marshals or whomever have asked him to do.

Charles: As soon as it was all done, then I sort of asked, OK, what's next? And there was no further reply.

Ben: And so Charles really starts to freak out. And he's written down a bunch of information during this several-day withdrawing and depositing spree, during which he's driven all over the state with all his cash to put it into Bitcoin ATMs. So he starts calling the numbers the border patrol had been calling him from.

Charles: But it's all burners. They don't exist. You can't call them back. You call them back and nothing happens. I contacted the, I guess it's the FBI, and they said, Oh, you can file your report, we're not going to do anything about it. There's nothing to be done. That was it. Nothing to be done. I filed a report, and they never contacted me.

Ben: Extremely frustrating. But that's why the people on the phone wanted Charles to deposit the funds into a Bitcoin wallet. Once the money moves to the blockchain, it is near impossible for the feds to trace it. Or at least, they won't make the effort for small potatoes like $60,000. They have bigger fish to fry than Charles's bank account.

Amory: Charles' story is wild. And upsetting, if we're being honest. But sadly, it's not unique.

Ben: It's true. The Global Financial Crime Report of 2024 says annual losses are $485 billion.

Amory: Check fraud?

Ben: $27 billion. Cyber-enabled scams?

Amory: $10 billion. Impersonation?

Ben: $7 billion. It's nuts. I just stopped my mom the other day from "canceling" a supposed automatic renewal for $400 from the Geek Squad. They had a bill and official letterhead and everything. A year or so ago, two really aggressive guys called from a New York number and said they were IRS cops, and they almost had me convinced I had committed tax fraud. And you know what? It didn't help that, yes, many years ago, I did have an H&R Block guy in Staten Island who was pretty fast and loose. Never change, Frankie. Hope you're well. I'm definitely still not subscribed to all of those industry magazines, and I am no longer writing them off.

Amory: I got scammed in college. I bought this, like, cleanse. It was like a berry cleanse.

Ben: Yeah. Sure. Of course. We all need a cleanse every once in a while. Yeah.

Amory: It was, I thought it was $50. It was, it ended up being $200, which was a lot of money for me back then. It's still a lot of money. Two hundred dollars is a lot, and one friend in particular will never, ever, ever let me live it down. Anyway, the point of the story is: Who among us has not been scammed at some point in our life? It's really frustrating.

Ben: But none of this is new. The e*************** is real. I think it is getting worse. But it's not new.

Amory: What does feel new is how much people are fighting back. And getting famous for fighting back.

Ben: We are in a renaissance of creators who spend their time tooling on scammers. And their silly, maddening tactics are racking up the views.

Kitboga: I use hardware to pitch my voice. And then if I add (voice filter) an old phone sound to it (resumes regular voice) you could, you could start to create other characters that are just (voice filter) like, now I'm an older gentleman. (resumes regular voice) And sometimes I'll end up even to make it more convincing to the scammer, I'll (voice filter) talk with this voice, and then: (as an older woman) I was telling you to pay the bills yesterday. Why didn't you pay the bills? (as an older man) I was trying, but the guy at H&R Block said he wasn't giving me the email. (resumes regular voice) And I'll just try to go back and forth with myself.

Ben: I'm Ben Berry-Cleanse-Scam Johnson

Amory: I'm Amory Only-Lost-$200-And-Not-$60,000 Sivertson. And you're listening to Endless Thread.

Ben: We're coming to you from a call center in Asia called WBUR and we want all your bank passwords!

Amory: He's kidding. We don't. Just donate to your local public radio station, will ya? Or get grandma to do it. She probably won't even realize what you're making her do.

Ben: She's kidding! She's kidding. Maybe.

Amory: I am. Please don't do that.

Ben: We need the money. Anyway.

Amory: That's true.

Ben: So the way this story really started was I saw an insane video of this hacker who goes by the handle Scambaiter on YouTube.

[Scambaiter: If you have been watching my channel for a while, you would have probably seen this video, in which I got the scammers very scared after they realized me and my team are watching their operation live through their own CCTV cameras.]

Amory: This kind of thing does really connect with our righteous fury, right? Fighting fire with fire. Giving them a taste of their own medicine.

Ben: For sure. Which I think is why there is all of a sudden this kind of glut of scambaiting content online. I went down a deep rabbit hole of Scambait content, including the scambait subreddit, which celebrates the idea of messing with the scammers.

[Atomic Shrimp: Let's go scambaiting again.]

[Scammer: Can I get your first and last name?

IRLrosie: Yeah, it's DiArrhea.

Scammer: Last name?

IRLrosie: P-A-N-T-Z.]

[Scammer: Oh my god, click on yes. Please click on yes. Please click on yes on the screen!

Scammer Payback (as elderly woman): OK, right click or left click?] 

[Trilogy Media's Ryan Benson: I've been tracing down hundreds of thousands of dollars that has been sent to you. 

Scammer: Oh, I know.

Benson: I have my team with me. And we'd like you to answer for that.]

[Matthew from IRLRosie: I know where you are. I know who you are. And I will find you.

Scammer: Oh my god. I got scared. I got scared.]

Amory: Someone who is very famous on the Scambait subreddit? The amazing-voices guy.

Kitboga: I go by Kitboga or Kit, and I have been investigating scammers for a little over seven years now.

Amory: Kit says he's probably been doing this for longer. But he's been doing it publicly for seven years, which he kind of just fell into.

Kitboga: I didn't plan on doing this as my job. I very much liked my job at the time.

Ben: Kit's job at the time was software engineer. He says he was just your average millennial, spending all his time on the internet. And he discovered an older viral video of something called Lennybot.

Amory: Lennybot was a chatbot written way back in the year of our lord, 2011. And it was designed to specifically scambait telemarketers and scammers by using 16 pre-recorded audio clips. The bot was designed to sound like an old Australian man. And it did.

[Lenny: "Hello, this is Lenny."] 

Ben: The idea of Lennybot…is that this guy who the telemarketers would call… woudn't be able to focus on their goal of getting their money. He'd get distracted. He wouldn't answer their questions really…but he'd keep them on the hook by allllmost answering their questions. And then bailing.

Kitboga: He'd say, Oh, there's a goose in my backyard. I gotta go look.

Amory: The creator of Lennybot is said to have been inspired by the idea of manifesting the telemarketer or scammers' worst possible nightmare. Because when you're scamming or telemarketing — which, we grant you, may technically be two different things with the same goal…

Ben: Trying to effectively separate people from their money, either for a real service that is not that useful or a not real service that is completely useless.

Amory: ...when you're doing this, time is money. So if you've got a mark on the phone and they waste your time and don't give you the goods, you're losing money.

Ben: Kitboga thought the Lennybot video he found on YouTube was genius. He started to watch a ton of videos on scammers, including scammers that used very specific tactics like calling elderly people and saying they're a representative of Microsoft trying to fix something on their computer.

Kitboga: And I immediately thought about my grandparents.

Amory: Kit had personal experience with scamming. His grandparents, who aren't alive anymore, were taken advantage of by scams in real life. He remembers this one time going to his grandparents' house and finding a gardener ripping out his grandma's rose bushes. She loved those rose bushes. But the gardener said she'd told him to take them out. Kit didn't buy it, and it turned out to be nonsense. The guy was taking advantage of his grandma by convincing her to pay him to ruin the thing she loved most in her garden.

Ben: If supervillains and superheroes have origin stories, the rose-bush incident was Kit's. Scamming really rubs him the wrong way. And internet-based scams, where people were calling elderly people to scam them out of money, seemed especially nefarious to him.

Kitboga: If I'm this software engineer, millennial, familiar with the internet, and I had no idea this existed, surely my grandma wouldn't have known that this existed.

Amory: So Kit was like, maybe I can be the Lennybot for a minute and be my own version of a scammer's worst nightmare.

Ben: It took him five minutes to find a scammer phone number. He called it. The scammer immediately said he had viruses on his computer, and they wanted to remotely connect to it. Kit freaked out.

Kitboga: I didn't know what to say. So I hung up.

Amory: Nonetheless, he was determined to figure out what he wanted to say. The direct experience on the phone had unleashed his fury even more.

Kitboga: And that was just the spark of inspiration to keep exploring.

Ben: In the coming days, Kitboga, a mild-mannered software programming dad, would begin to transform and focus on a scambaiter superhero mission.

Kitboga: The idea was if I spent 10 minutes on the phone, that was 10 minutes that the scammer wasn't talking to someone's grandma.

[Scammer: What time did you buy this computer?

Kitboga (as an elderly woman): Uh, 1994.]

[Scammer: You typed something wrong.

Kitboga (as an older man): Ah, nah, I double-checked it.]

[Kitboga: Do you know anything about computers?]

[Scammer: I already gave you the right address! You made the mistake!

Kitboga (as an older man): Why did you do that, Joe? Why'd you pick a 3, it looks just like a B!]

[Scammer: $450,000! Are you f****** serious right now?]

[Scammer: We've been on the phone for 6,218 minutes. Cut the BS, go get your insurance paper and grab the VIN number.

Kitboga (as an elderly man): Yeah, for the Ford, the F150.

Kitboga (as an elderly woman): We don't have a Ford, sweetheart.

Scammer: Oh my gosh.]

Amory: This mission…would end the software programming life of Kitboga as he knew it. It would connect him to a veritable Justice League of scambaiting superheroes and earn him legions of enraged fans.

Ben: Three and a half million subscribers on YouTube. Thousands blowing up in the Twitch chats.

Amory: All part of an ever-expanding world of scambait content.

Ben: Which you will hear some of in a minute.

[SPONSOR BREAK]

Amory: Something we didn't really realize, and that Kitboga didn't realize either at first, was the sheer breadth and explosion of scambait content. It's on YouTube...

[Scammer Payback: Got him! I can't say what we did, but we got him, baby.]

Amory: ...It's on Instagram...

[Scammer: Is your Chrome open?

IRLRosie (as an elderly woman): Well, when I open my computer, I see little puzzle pieces made of cat barf.] 

Amory: ...TikTok...

[@youthpastorryan: Somebody just tried to scam me online, so let's have some fun.]

Amory: ...Twitch...

[Scammer: You're not listening again, ma'am.

RinoaPoison: What do you mean, I'm "not listening again"? I'm sorry, I'm a little confused.] 

Amory: ...but a ton of it is on Reddit.

Ben: And on Reddit, it's really interesting, because while there are definitely scambait superheroes — people with big followings trying to own scammers in a very public and humiliating way — there are also just regular people posting their Ws and Ls of messing with scammers in screenshots.

Amory: When we talk about scamming, we're talking about something that's been going on for decades. Centuries? But there are a few factors in recent years that really seem to be contributing.

Ben: For one thing, the evolution of technology — from messaging platforms to the move to smartphones from landlines — has been increasingly hard for older generations to grapple with. All of a sudden your bank, your computer, your Facebook account, it's all software-based and shipping new feature updates that even tech-savvy people are like, Wait, why doesn't it work or look the same way that it used to?

Amory: You sure that's not just you talking?

Ben: I mean, it is, that's the thing. And like, I feel like I'm pretty tech-savvy, just like Charles. Charles was also pretty tech-savvy. So this stuff is moving quickly and it becomes confusing quickly.

Amory: It's also easier than it's ever been to spoof legit organizations when you're a scammer, and the internet has only made the selling and using of our contact information easier.

Ben: And then there's the pandemic. As users flooded online, scammers capitalized, and the tools of the trade skyrocketed.

Amory: The IRS reported in 2022 a significant increase in text-based scams. Otherwise known as SMS-based phishing. Smishing?

Ben: Smishing! It's called smishing.

Amory: OK. Well, when a random person texts you and tries to get you to click on a link and then steals your data and gets you to expose sensitive information about yourself or your bank accounts, that's the smishing.

Ben: That's the smishing. Yeah. And that same year the FTC said that just the text scams in the US cost consumers $330 million.

Amory: All of this leads to another famous scambaiter who really noticed the increasingly annoying presence of scammers during the pandemic. And has turned his frustration into a full-fledged business, humble as he may be about it.

Jim Browning: I'm pleased you've even heard of me. I'm still amazed that people have heard of me, but there you go.

Ben: Yes, this man is Irish, and yes a vast amount of his audience on YouTube is American, which he says is probably why people think he's Scottish — because we don't differentiate our accents all that well from across the pond.

Amory: I was getting the Irish, I think.

Ben: Me too. Anyway, meet Jim Browning — or, somebody who calls himself Jim Browning.

Jim: It was actually a spur-of-the-moment thing. It is not my real name. Yeah. Because I disrupt multimillion-dollar scams, and I'd rather scammers don't know exactly who I am, so they don't come to my door some night. At least, that's the theory anyway.

Amory: Oh, he does sound Scottish now. Well, like Kitboga, Jim has a family. Used to have a different tech job. Worked in IT during the day. Played around with scambaiting at night. Then his night work started making more money than his day work because he monetized his YouTube channel.

Jim: I was doing the kind of YouTube stuff in the evenings. I wasn't having a lot of time with my family and stuff. So I decided about a year and a half ago to give up the day job and do this for a living.

Amory: And now he goes after scammers around the world.

Ben: It's not quite Robin Hood, but it does have, I guess there is a sort of crusading aspect to it in a way.

Jim: I have been called the, the internet Batman at one point, which I kinda see where that comes from, but I wouldn't see myself in those terms at all.

Ben: Fair. But like the Batman, Jim uses sophisticated tools to go after bad guys.

Jim: I run a scam but in reverse. I lead on scammers, so I deliberately engage with them, I try to let them play through their scam to its conclusion, and, particularly if they try to get access to my computer, I reverse that, and I get access to their computer. And I've been able to unravel a whole lot of scams as a result.

Ben: To me, this sounds like hacking. Or, hacking back.

Amory: The ol' hack-back sneak attack!

Jim: There are weak points in every scam, and I've been able to try and exploit that, not just to kind of report the people who run the scams to the police. But actually, because they, for example, all use these computer networks to make their phone calls, it means that I can tap into those and listen to other people being scammed and warn them.

Ben: It is truly wild to watch and listen to Jim and people like him do their thing.

[Jim: Are you in San Jose or not? 

Scammer:  Why should I tell you these questions, sir?]

[Jim: And there's your face. Yeah. Oh, you want to cover the webcam now, do you? That's strange. Isn't it?]

[Jim: A scammer has just seen a photograph of him and his family on my desktop. 

Scammer: I'm shivering. Seriously.]

[Store Clerk: Hello?

Jim: Is the woman at the Bitcoin ATM machine in your premises? She's being scammed. It's the Customs and Borders scam, if you've heard of that.]

Jim: I've saved well over a million dollars, even in the last couple of years, from scam victims.

Amory: What's interesting, though, is that when you ask Jim if he's a hacker, he'll say no. Kitboga, who uses special hardware and a talent for doing voices to do similar things to Jim, would also say no.

Kitboga: I often say that I feel a bit like I'm hacking someone's brain. There's a term called social engineering.

Jim: I would describe myself much more of a social engineer.

Amory: And that's not uncomplicated. Because a lot of the scamming is coming from places where, if you're an American, there might be a language barrier.

[John Breyault on NBC News: These are organized criminal gangs, often overseas...]

[Heather Hiscox on CBC News: Scammers in India]

[David Common on CBC News: It doesn't look like they're calling from India. They use call spoofing. (ROLL)] 

[Michael Atkin on ABC News (Australia): Inside the call center are dozens of Filipinos.]

[Aunshul Rege on BBC News: When they think of romance scams, Oh it must be Nigerian.]

Ben: You have to admit that there's a lot of xenophobia that plays into how Americans think about, and talk about, scammers. But it is also true that one of the things that makes scamming such a good way to make money is the existence of international borders. If you're running a call center, say getting people to pay a bogus cancellation fee, and you're in India, and the person paying the fee is in America or the UK, it's hard to get results through the usual channels, according to Jim.

Jim: The very first phone calls that I got, my initial thought was, If I can trace where the phone calls coming from, maybe I could write to their internet service provider and get them thrown off the network. And naively, I thought that sort of thing would be possible but that didn't work out too well.

A: …because getting an internet service provider in India, if you're calling from the UK, to go after a call center in India? It's tricky. In India, there have been many reports about scam call centers bribing politicians, internet providers, and law enforcement to stay in operation.

Ben: Jim and Kit have had personal experience with this. Jim went from trying to contact an internet service provider to trying to contact local law enforcement. No response.

Jim: I can only type in English and, for all I know, they couldn't even translate what I'd written and it was just binned. So I've no idea what actually happened, but naively, I kind of thought maybe if I do send a link, something will happen. But in reality, nothing did.

Ben: In some ways, for both Kit and Jim, this reality — the kind of scam-as-side-effect-of-globalization-and-resiliancy-of-national-borders thing, is the reason that both scambaiter superheroes took to streaming in the first place. They were without recourse.

Amory: That, and they were also just obsessed. At least, that's what Kit's friends might say.

Kitboga: I wouldn't shut up about it. I'd always be telling them about these things I did with scammers. And one of them one day said, Why don't you stream it on Twitch? So I can watch. And I was like, Oh, OK, cool. So it was just me and a couple of friends.

Ben: And this combination of frustration and a lack of solutions just led to weirder and weirder stuff from our Justice League.

Kitboga: I was playing the "Boot Scootin' Boogie," that country song.  And one of the scammers started singing it with me.

Ben: The rest was history.]

Amory: Kitboga has 12 people working with him now. He has millions of followers on YouTube and Twitch.

Ben: He is managed by an esports management company, which is like people who are international superstars for playing video games and Kitboga.

Amory: Oh, and by the way, Jim? While he doesn't have official management representation or a team of 12, he does have over 4 million followers on YouTube. He also employs people in India to help him do his social-engineering experiments with scammers.

Ben: He actually pays people there to effectively break into call centers to get information and set up technology. It's wild and dangerous work.

Amory: He uses all of this to jump in the middle when intervening on scam calls between the scammers and the victims.

[Victim: Hello?

Jim: Hello, my name is Jim Browning. The person you were just speaking to is a scammer. I don't know if you're aware of that. They're pretending to be a bank.

Victim: OK.]

Amory: And he's got some nice hardware, too.

Jim: (using voice filter) So this is the way the scammers would hear me. This is my old-woman voice. (no filter) And I can turn that voice on and off, but the idea is that I lull them into a false sense of security. I make the same mistakes an old lady would make on her computer.]

Ben: Is what you're doing technically legal? 

Jim: No, it isn't.

Amory: Because, you know, he's accessing someone's computer without their permission, which, we should say is kind of what the scammers do, too.

Ben: Legal or not, Jim and Kit are two of many, many people doing this. And they all talk. There's a Discord that we would really like to get invited to. Still waiting. They trade information on the scammers. And tricks.

Amory: And some of these tricks are maybe a little more above-board than others.

Kitboga: There's such a wide range of techniques. And in some cases, some folks will take the vigilantism, if that's a word, to a level that I'm not comfortable with.

Ben: If it's a club, it's a loose club because different members seem to have different rules. Those rules get different results, too. Kitboga seems to have a special talent for not just driving scammers crazy, but getting them to open up as well.

Kitboga: They'll call me later on WhatsApp or something, and we'll have a heart-to-heart conversation, and they're like, You know what? You guys in America are rich, and if you've got 10-grand in your bank and I take $2,000 of it, what's it to you?

Amory: Jim hears some of this kind of thing, too. And some might say it's a fair question.

Ben: Which is why, Amory, I wanted to talk to an actual scammer.

Amory: Oh boy. Here we go.

Ben: Yep. So I started with this text that I randomly got from a scam number where they said, I would like to talk to you about your saloon idea.  And I was like, Absolutely. Let's talk about the saloon idea. Let's do it. I can't wait. I've been waiting for somebody to talk to me about my saloon idea. And so, you know, I and producer Dean Russell figured we'd get in touch.

[Ben: should I call them? 

Dean Russell: Yeah, I think you should call them. 

Ben: To talk about the saloon project? 

Dean: Yeah.

Ben: Alright, let's do it. 

Voicemail: Please check the number and dial again. Message three. OK-02. MN.]

Amory: Oh no! Your saloon dream deferred!

Ben: I have no sarsaparilla to pour unfortunately. And honestly, part of this whole thing is that it really is hard to get a scammer on the phone, even if it's easy for them to get you on the phone. Or on text.

[Unidentified voice: Hello?   

Ben: I got a call from this number, and I don't understand why I got a call from this number. ... Ouh, they hung up.]

[Ben: Hello, I'd like to give you some money. Hello?]

Unidentified voice: You are on our block list. Goodbye.

Ben: I'm on their block list!]

[Voicemail: Please leave your message after the tone.

Ben: Hey, it's Mervin. I'm looking for Blurgle.]

["David": Thank you for calling customer support. This is David. How can I help you? 

Ben: Hey, is my computer hacked?

"David": How could I know, sir?

Ben: You're customer support, right? ... Hello?]

Ben: But Amory, Dean, who didn't want to use his real name with the scammers for understandable reasons, he did kind of hit a jackpot.

[Scammer: What is your name, sir?  

Dean: Jake Barry. 

Scammer: F*** you, Jakes Barry.  

Dean: What's that? 

Scammer: I said, "Hold the line. Let me check for you."

Dean: Did you just say, F*** me?  

Scammer: No. I said, "F*** your wife." Why would I f*** you?  

Dean: Oh my God.

Scammer: Yes. Yes.  

Dean: Seriously, I'm actually curious why you scam people. I would love to know. I really would love to know.

Scammer: Yeah, I don't have money, buddy. I don't have a good job to take care of my family. That's the reason I scam people for money.]

Amory: Wow, that Dean Russell. This was unexpected.

Ben: I know. I think one of the really hard things about this is that Dean and I left this experience kind of feeling icky. Because yes, of course there are people in the world who do bad things and they should be punished for that. And they should be confronted, too. But at the same time, is any of this — the scambaiting, the fighting with the people doing the scamming — is it getting at the root of the problem?

Amory: Kitboga and Jim seem to have come to this profession somewhat randomly. But they both say that some scambaiters seem to have gotten into scambaiting specifically for the money. And that doesn't feel great! Because they're not really making the bosses lives a living hell.

Ben: Yeah, which we asked Jim about.

Ben: The scammers themselves are humans who often are in desperate places themselves. And so, how do you think about that?

Jim: I mean, I do occasionally, particularly if I can't get access to the scammers, I will flat out ask them: "I know you're running a scam. Why are you doing this?" And I've yet to hear anyone being really truthful about it and say, "I do it for the money."

Ben: Do you have a code of honor that you live by? 

Jim: Yes, I do. The code of honor, if you like, I would say would be, I will go to the extent of giving them fake information, including fake credit card information, but if I get access to their systems, I will never, for example, attempt to steal money back from them again.

Amory: Kit also has some lines. He also has mixed feelings. On the one hand, he feels good about taking up time that might otherwise be spent hurting someone else. But?

Kitboga: These are people. I have kids, and so I think it would be very naive of me to say that if I was in some crazy situation in which I had  lost, you know, my job and lost all hope. And I'm like, everywhere I turned to, I wasn't able to — like my neighbor didn't have any food.  I'm going to do like, let's be, I'm going to do something to get my kids food. Right? I think if we're honest about it.

Amory: Maybe not a surprising answer, but it is interesting that there's a lot of gray in here, even for the superheroes — which are fake characters we have made up that usually exist in worlds with a lot of black and white.

Ben: Right. And I want to go back to my neighbor Charles for a minute. Because to me, he had some really interesting things to say about all of this. And I think, maybe, something for us to land on.

Charles: You know, I can remember being robbed of a little backpack when I was, you know, 14 years old. I still remember that. That's more emotional for me than this. Somehow because, you know, there wasn't a knife, there wasn't a gun, it was all sort of this vague, you know, external thing. It's almost like it didn't happen.

Amory: Charles said that the stolen money didn't ruin his life. It was actually money he was thinking about donating it. And that's the sad part. He wanted to use that money to make a difference in organizations he cared about.

Ben: And when I asked him about his feelings toward the scammers, he had this to say:

Charles: Well, oddly, one, one feeling is admiration. These are really skilled people. They're good at what they do.

Ben: They're also far from alone.

Charles: You know, there's so many different ways people are scamming us, so is it any different than the robber barons of years gone by? The Kennedy money was on alcohol, the Facebook money. You know, like those are also scammers. I'll call it the capitalistic extractive culture. How is that different? It's like we're in a culture of, Hey, get what you can, no matter what.

Ben: If you could talk to them again, if they did pick up the phone, is there anything you'd say to them? 

Charles: Tell me your life story. I'd like to understand kind of how you got to the place of doing what you're doing.

Ben: This episode was co-hosted by me, Ben Brock Johnson, and an extremely wealthy debutant from Ohio named Amory Sivertson, who is just trying to give away a very valuable Steinway piano.

It was produced by myself and a Portlandian Prince named Dean Russell, who just needs your routing number to transfer $8 million US to your account.

It was mixed and sound-designed by Emily Jankowski, who would like me to pay $400 to cancel my ProTools software subscription.

The rest of our team is Paul Vaitkus, Samata Joshi, Grace Tatter, Katelyn Harrop, Frannie Monahan, And Matt Reed.

Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and the strange voice of an old man that I do not need special hardware to create. If you have an untold history, unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet you want us to tell, just spam and scam Endless Thread at WBUR dot org. See you next week!