A scambaiting vigilante is developing his very own artificially developed program with one objective in mind. To waste a scammer’s time.
Scambaiting is a growing pastime whereby self-proclaimed “scambaiters” purposely make themselves the target for a variety of Internet and phone scammers. And while the scammers may believe they found themselves a willing victim, the scambaiter is merely just playing along, pretending to be a victim, with the ultimate goal of just wasting the scammer’s time. After all, every minute a scammer is wasting with a scambaiter is a minute they’re not conning a real victim out of their hard earned cash.
Many scambaiters record their interactions with the scammers. And this often results in some quite hilarious videos. We’ve previously covered these videos in the past.
“Kitboga” is one such scambaiter, and he has been uploading videos to Twitch and YouTube for many years now. He’s caught on video some genuinely fantastic moments as he takes on the guise of a vulnerable elderly lady with one mission in life; infuriate cyber crooks as much as possible.
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Kitboga purposely makes his details available to cyber crooks (using dedicated emails and phone numbers, so don’t try it yourself you with your personal details) but now he’s targeted by so many cyber crooks he can’t keep up with the barrage of calls, many of which originate from scam call centres in India.
As such, he’s in partnership with others from the scambaiting community to develop artificial intelligence software that can not only receive calls from scammers, but detect what the scammers are asking and provide relevant responses. Each response is designed to keep the crooks on the phone for as long as possible under the belief they’re speaking to be a potential victim. But of course, they’ll actually be talking to a robot; a robot that isn’t likely to be scammed.
Kitboga tells the BBC –
If I can keep them on the phone for an hour, that’s an hour they weren’t talking to someone else.
…
I wanted to get out there and do something. Whenever I got that dozen inbound phone calls everyday, I can’t answer all of them. So if I just forward those to an AI, and even if it just wasted 10, 20 minutes, that adds up.
And Kitboga knows all about wasting a scammer’s time. His YouTube channel shows him talking with different scammers for hours on end, and his comedic style has seen his channel surge to over 1.6 million subscribers.
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Koitboga’s goal is to allow victims to simply forward any scam calls they get over to his AI software, which will then keep the crooks on the phone for as long as possible. And if the software can also infuriate the crooks nearly as well as Kitboga can, well that’s a bonus. After all, as we said earlier, every minute these crooks are on the phone to Kitboga or his AI software, that’s a minute less they’ll be scamming real victims.
Check out Kitboga’s interview with the BBC here and you can check out his YouTube channel here. For our tips on avoiding phone scams, click here.