Scambaiters pose as potential victims to waste the time and resources of scammers, gather information useful to authorities, and publicly expose scammers. They may document scammers' tools and methods, warn potential victims, provide discussion forums, disrupt scammers' devices and systems using remote access trojans and computer viruses, or take down fraudulent webpages. Some scambaiters are motivated by a sense of civic duty, some simply engage for their own amusement, or a combination of both.

Several of my coworkers, over the course of the last several months, have received text messages purporting to be from our CEO requesting that they buy gift certificates “for a client.” Upon purchase, they were to send photos of the cards with the code numbers on back to our “CEO” as soon as possible.

After the first set of received texts was reported internally and determined to be a scam, future recipients decided to have a little fun with the scammers and screen cap their conversations to post in Slack for all to enjoy.

I’ve been ravenously jealous of the recipients because I wanted to play scambaiter. Desperately wanted to!

My moment finally arrived yesterday and I’m posting them here for your enjoyment as well.

I really had more I wanted to say and do but I botched the codes I sent and they clearly caught on and never replied to me after this final message. I should’ve known better. Oh well. It was still fun. 

Can you count all the contradictions and factual inaccuracies I made in there? I lost count. Give it a try. To get you started, no, Katie is not pregnant and my boss, Jen, is not in New Orleans.