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?
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?
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.
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.