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.
It can be tricky to make it through the automated menus if you don’t speak the language (though I’m sure you’ve memorized the sequence by now), but once you get to a human, they’re bilingual and completely fluent in English.
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.
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.
I think my bank did that as the experience looked far from the usual chat bot. I just had to say "you cannot help me I need to talk to a human".
EDD: Employment Development Department, appears to be some sort of job seeker assistance group? PFL: Paid Family Leave - Maternity/Paternity or carer style leave.
They manage payments and benefits for unemployment, disability, and Paid Family Leave (PFL), the last of which is paid time off from work you can take when you have a new baby. I think they also manage some statistics and data around employment disability etc.
PFL in California guarantees the state will pay you something like 70-80% of your typical wages, for up to 8 weeks, while you take time off to bond with and care for your baby.
There is no guaranteed paid paternity or maternity time in the USA so I am lucky to live in a state that offers this. You may view this program as either generous or paltry compared to your own countries offerings.
- sincerely, a European
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.
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.
That is the only way I've ever gotten in the queue so far though, calling multiple times right at opening hour. And then once in the queue I see the issue above re: no answer / mailbox is full after waiting on hold for ages for my turn.
I also have a thing on my phone that automatically pushes the right buttons as fast as possible to navigate to the extension I need (for a more efficient rejection).
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.
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.
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...
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.
Most of the scammers in the video had thick accents, but if from that you conclude that scammers in general are "non western", that's at best a dumb conclusion, at worst a racist one. I don't know details of Kitboga's scammers' demographics, but there is no logical reason to assume the proportion of scammers in the West is any different than in other places of the world.
This is really the kind of absurdly tone deaf, entitled comment that turns me off the most in HN - West uber alles.
your explanation seems overly complicated.
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."
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.
If they were timid and accommodating, the call would most likely end up as "let me check with my bank and get back to you. Thank you"
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.
Presumably because the scammer's account was on kraken?
REminder that at this point Kitboga and victim had still not connected.
Scammer then gave QR maze infoline # to victim,and asked victim to try to call and untie the knot. That's really how Kitboga got involved.
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.
Well that GPT5 isn't gonna train itself
maybe the captcha was made with chatGPT to begin with.
AIs creating jobs for AIs to keep (server) employment at 100%
Deleting cookies doesn't change anything.
I sometimes get through and haven't figured out what's different.
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.
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:
- 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.
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
https://www.csis.org/analysis/cyber-scamming-new-destination...
When I was reading through kitboga's site earlier it said that they "make some light of a dark situation" which sums it up well.
Kitboga is a youtube national treasure.
I get that this is amusing and a good way to waste scammers' time, but where did he originally find the scammers?
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?
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!
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).
There is a relatively new technique though: scammers often have victims call them back once the victim has bought gift cards or whatever. So if once you get one of those callback numbers you can just call in pretending to be a victim in process. The scammers don't currently have pipeline management adequate to know if you're really a victim or not.
This lets you skip a bunch of the early and failure prone stages (scammers hang up calls eagerly at the beginning if they get the slightest hint you're not a real victim) and go right to the end game where things are much more fun and the scammers are much less likely to bail out.
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.
Low wages sure, but high unemployment is not correct. Most scammers seem to be based in India where unemployment is around 3%.
Is it a faux pas to say the truth, which is Calcutta ?
Some of the scammers in the original video sound Nigerian to me, not sure what the situation is there.
The average salary for a person working in a regular, semi-skilled job, in a tier-1 or tier-2 city, is about 50,000 Rs., or about 625 USD.
For a whole month, working 8 hours a day, if the scammer can scam just 10 people, out of 100 USD each, they will be the top 10% earners in India.
So, if there is a vulnerable victim, earning 5000 USD, means they can almost not work for another 8 to 10 months.
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.
It’s so clearly a scam.
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.
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.
The fact that phone calls cannot be verified. Why can’t we design a system that can eye ball scan you before you call and verify that you really work for Microsoft. Or verify that I’m pinging off USA cell towers.
For example with the robocall issue the ftc actually implemented system solutions. Why don’t we put it on the ftc to also fix this issue?!
Its possible that the logical end to this is that Kitboga ends up interacting with the most gullible scammers, and the clever ones evolve to recognize the likes of Kit and protect themselves, if it can be called that.
Even this video, when sufficiently viral, is a beacon call to scammers to identify scam baiters.
How long before the scammers start using AI to find patterns in speech content and patterns, to identify Kit early on.
RC Collins, Bud from Ojai, Margaret Gray, Bobbie Dooley, etc. All hilarious.
Scamming old people out of their retirement is the worst thing someone can do. I have no empathy for those scammers.
They are barely paid phone workers just doing scripts and doing what they are told just so they can feed their families.
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.
That doesn’t make it OK, but that is probably how they justify stealing other people’s money.
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.
Some firms actually do both legitimate support/customer service work and scamming side by side. I've called legit companies support lines before and the person picking up starts off doing some scam and them I'm like, "I thought this was Brand X," and they switch, "Oh yes, sorry about that. What was your order number?" That's how bad it's gotten.
Judging by the calls I hear, I don’t give them that benefit at all. They sound pretty happy to scam the elderly.
Maybe as a first-responder that could work, but if you’re talking to an elderly and convincing them to hand over hundreds or thousands of dollars, you do not have my sympathy.
In one video you see them drain some elderly persons bank accounts completely then the next day someone comes in with bag of cocaine and they're all doing lines to celebrate and hopping back on their calls all hyped up.
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.
As if they've hijacked the wrong side of scam.
He got a bunch of scammers to give up bank routing information for an ostensible wire transfer using a script he wrote to use speech-to-text software combined with a natural language interpreter which determined what prerecorded voice lines to play. The process took 8 minutes in one case. https://youtube.com/watch?v=maP2DwgdBts
I 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...
How is that going to help, pretty sure Kitboga would have enabled domain privacy.
> 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.
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!
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.
They do have whatsapp group chats though.
While the idea of wasting the call center operators time appears noble. After watching a few of these scam baiter videos, it appears the call centers are staffed with at least a few dozen people. If one dumb operator stays on the line for 8+ hrs with a scam baiter while the other operators are taking calls from real potential victims. The impact seems limited.
Also, some people will say that it’s educational. But if you look at the target audience of the scammers, it’s mostly the elderly and/or those with dementia or some other progressive mental illness. The education won’t help this vulnerable population.
How do we stop the root of the issue? How do we make it so that scamming the elderly and vulnerable population is not profitable?
For regular folk, who may not have much knowledge about computers and stuff, if they hear "mY nAmE is STevEN" with an Indian accent, tell them to shove it.
This looks like the "scambaiter" actually scammed an artist into making some pretty sweet art under the guise of a scolarship. Am I missing something, or is this actual fraud?
I believe it's origins were going directly after the scammers behind an advance-fee scam, a.k.a. the "Nigerian prince scam". 419 is in reference to some criminal code.
I am slightly skeptical, but kinda hesitantly agreeable, and try to keep them on the phone as long as possible and go through as many levels of their org as possible and mess with the end sales person.
If just 1% of all people did this, I think it would kill telemarketing. AI bots though are starting to make it annoying. I try to get through their screening questions and get to a human, but sometimes it is clear there is no human to reach.
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.
Furthermore, aren't most high-trust societies, such as Japan or European countries have similar stock of people. I am uncertain whether individuals like me, who look different due to skin color / have an accent, would be readily accepted into these high-trust societies.
Some of these are arguably "victimless crimes" - like cheating at the school. Yet I agree that the constant exposure to moral failure may lead to desensitizing people of morality.
I initially liked the guy but grew a bit tired of him using what could be veiled racism for views — I’m not accusing him of anything; it just felt cringy-er than I like my YouTube. The ethics are more complicated than that, but something bothered me, especially since that special episode where they sent someone physically there, let pests in the building, etc.
I couldn’t put my finger on why. I didn’t particularly appreciate using animals, but that wasn’t it. I wasn’t a fan of the tall Serbian guy and his friend: they felt like standard prankster YouTubers, and I wouldn't say I like those. It felt like Mark Rober was part of it (He’s my favorite YouTuber, like everyone here) but didn’t like it; he should have been more active but wasn’t… More on MR later. It’s relevant—I promise.
In the meantime, my partner (a medical doctor) has been watching those for a while. She loved it: administrative nightmare, people taking advantage of older people, computer glitches… there was so much schadenfreude to keep her giggling for hours after long shifts. I liked watching over her shoulder, recognizing the episode, and telling her if something good was coming (those are long).
I have this pet theory that some jobs are intensive (you work as much as you do, like clinical work for doctors, plumbers, bakers, or therapists) or extensive (you do things that work for you, like teacher, software developer!). Anyone with an intensive job has a terrible life because they have to work too much in construction. So I’m very tolerant of what you do after a shift to rebuild yourself. (And I think we, the tech community, should turn every job into an extensive one because that’s a better life).
But there still was something that bothered me. It was about how he needed the views to justify his time hacking them, and the views relied on a show that was always the same, and the poor, desperate, upset, and soon openly racist Indian “call center” operator had to be the bad guy. Having the bad guy always have the same skin color didn’t make the viewer any less problematic.
I thought about the theory of Moral luck (some people are in a position where they have to make hard choices, neither option is moral, and judging them for their worst decision without the context is complicated), but it wasn’t it…
I thought about how, after that big bust and the subsequent one, authorities arrested many people. They let most of them go because, of course, the police are deeply in the pocket of the owners that you never see in those videos, who are never really risking much. It felt performative: nothing structural happened. It also felt possibly “culturally racist”: again, good reason to suspect corruption in India, but without evidence, it still felt prejudicial. But obvious.
But then I say this video (the first two minutes, I’m waiting for my partner to come from her shift to watch it together — she’s going to love that one). Kitboga didn’t just find something better, automating him wasting time with others: I recognize that team huddled around a table. That’s a product team. It felt more like a physical product team, like what you see in Mark Rober’s video about his toy company, but suddenly it clicked:
I didn't like Kitboga videos, not just because they were ineffective, but because they couldn’t scale. He had to spend time wasting their time, “making content” to get one caller to waste his time. This video is about someone who has done intensive work until now, switching to automation and opening himself to extensive work.
This time, fighting spammers doesn't rely on at least enough of them being “minstrels” (caricatural entertaining stereotypes: the thing that led to the expression “black face”) to make “good content.” It works as a video based on the excitement around building and iterating on a product, led by data.
Well, presumably led by data: I haven’t watched beyond the second minute when he says they were tracking “EVERY click,” so my product analyst self suddenly felt very involved in that part.
That’s why I like (and I’m assuming everyone on HN likes) Mark Rober’s videos: he builds a product. There’s some story-telling, but he clearly follows the ups and downs of trying to build a systematic solution to a given problem. This is something that MR wasn't able to do in the video with spies getting inside the call center.
I sometimes struggle to explain my theory about intensive and extensive work, or what makes a company “product-driven,” and why it’s so important. You rarely have both options that are easy to compare favorably in an industry without the gap in quality being so prevalent: industrial bread vs. hand-make baker, ready-to-wear vs. bespoke fashion. But for so much software, having an industrial option is usually better because quantity has a quality of its own.
Here, Kitboga is trying to fight an industry. It doesn’t matter that he’s witty every time he’s talking to an agent; he just needs to be witty enough to edit it into his video. To fight scammers, he needs scale — a different scale than what millions of viewers can give him. This automation will allow him to waste so much scammer time that he might make the sector unprofitable. Not sure when, where, or how… (indeed, they’ll notice when they step in a maze?), but that glimpse at possible success where no one thought that was possible. Everyone who started a company knows that moment, the product-market-fit, the Road-to-Damascus glimpse:
“Are you a billionaire?
- Not yet, but soon.
- How?!
- That one guy said that I’ve made his day a little bit better.”
Seeing someone work on something for years and finally change—that’s a rare sight. I’m happy it was all filmed.
Plus, those look like horrifying UX dark patterns. I love those. Now that I’ve wasted everyone’s time with my theory, my partner is finally home: let’s watch it.
Kitboga definitely isn't using veiled racism like other scambaiters, unless you consider scambaiting itself racist to an extent.
As far as the "cannot scale" argument. His videos are educational. Most times here starts and ends his videos with a warning and a message to make sure you and your loved ones know how to spot these scammers. I for one have shared his videos with grandparents and they loved them, but were also saddened that some people do fall for these things. Since they were made aware, I would say they are 10x as safe when talking on the phone and browsing the web, maybe even to a fault since now they call me when something looks phishy... Anyways as long as his channel is growing and more people consume his content and spread awareness, it is scaling.
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.
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.
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.
Not everything is a slippery slope, it turns out. It’s ok to go outside with your eyes open still.