Baiting...
Per Wikipedia... Scam baiting (or scambaiting) is a form of internet vigilantism primarily used towards advance-fee fraud, IRS impersonation scam, technical support scams, pension scams, and consumer financial fraud.
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.
This is great. You know people do, but I wonder _who_ falls for this? "I'm in a meeting and need some gift cards" from a random number you've never seen before.
The big one here in AZ and maybe in your neck of the woods too, are those "I'd like to buy your house as is cash offer" to which I also like to take them down a bit of a texting hole. "Sure, $800,000 in a blue bag filled with unmarked untraceable 20s and it's yours. Do we have a deal?"
Posted by: Kevin Spencer | Friday, 29 April 2022 at 06:02 PM
What do they say in response?
Posted by: kapgar | Friday, 29 April 2022 at 06:53 PM
I had someone call me the other day wanting to talk about the internet connection I have with their company (which I don't) but I wasn't quick enough off the mark to baitscam them and said I didn't have a connection with them and they literally hung up straight away. No fun at all!!
Posted by: Kazza | Sunday, 01 May 2022 at 06:02 AM
That could’ve been fun.
Posted by: kapgar | Sunday, 01 May 2022 at 08:55 AM