Call Center-Pranking 'Scambaiters' Amass Millions of Fans on Social Media

The Guardian reports on "a new breed of scambaiters...taking over TikTok and YouTube." And one of them has more than 1.5 million followers across both video platforms. "Three to four days a week, for one or two hours at a time, Rosie Okumura, 35, telephones thieves and messes with their minds," reports the Guardian: For the past two years, the LA-based voice actor has run a sort of reverse call centre, deliberately ringing the people most of us hang up on — scammers who pose as tax agencies or tech-support companies or inform you that you've recently been in a car accident you somehow don't recall. When Okumura gets a scammer on the line, she will pretend to be an old lady, or a six-year-old girl, or do an uncanny impression of Apple's virtual assistant Siri. Once, she successfully fooled a fake customer service representative into believing that she was Britney Spears. "I waste their time," she explains, "and now they're not stealing from someone's grandma...." Batman became Batman to avenge the death of his parents; Okumura became a scambaiter after her mum was scammed out of $500... Thankfully, the bank was able to stop the money leaving her mother's account, but Okumura wanted more than just a refund. She asked her mum to give her the number she'd called and called it herself, spending an hour and 45 minutes wasting the scammer's time. "My computer's giving me the worst vibes," she began in Kim Kardashian's voice. "Are you in front of your computer right now?" asked the scammer. "Yeah, well it's in front of me, is that... that's like the same thing?" Okumura put the video on YouTube and since then has made over 200 more videos, through which she earns regular advertising revenue (she also takes sponsorships directly from companies). "A lot of it is entertainment — it's funny, it's fun to do, it makes people happy," she says when asked why she scambaits. "But I also get a few emails a day saying, 'Oh, thank you so much, if it weren't for that video, I would've lost $1,500.'" Okumura isn't naive — she knows she can't stop people scamming, but she hopes to stop people falling for scams. "I think just educating people and preventing it from happening in the first place is easier than trying to get all the scammers put in jail...." The Guardian also describes Jim Browning, a Northern Irish YouTuber with nearly 3.5 million subscribers who's been posting scambaiting videos for seven years. "Browning regularly gets access to scammers' computers and has even managed to hack into the closed-circuit TV footage of call centres in order to identify individuals. He then passes this information to the 'relevant authorities' including the police, money-processing firms and internet service providers...." And they also tell the story of an American software engineer who joined with friends to convince a scammer he'd been offered a high-paying job — only to end up stranded in Laos after paying for a 600-miles flight. "He was crying... that was the one where I was like, 'Ah, maybe I'm taking things a little too far.'"

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