Some of the most popular videos on his YouTube channel, which has more than 2 million subscribers, stars the character "Matilda," an elderly woman who shares running commentary about her life to scammers convinced she's an easy mark. One who calls himself Kitboga uses a voice modulator to make himself sound like one of several personalities he's created. Not all scam baiters follow Browning's formula. But over time, he attracted more than 3.5 million subscribers, with notable jumps since the pandemic. He hoped his proof would spark internet disconnects and police raids.
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He'd highlight the scams using screen recording software to show how the scams work, with a methodical commentary in his low, strongly accented voice. "I consistently stop scams nearly every single day," he says.īrowning began uploading videos to YouTube initially as an easy way to provide evidence to internet service providers and law enforcement. But if they can disrupt even a fraction of the frauds out there, Browning says, anyone keeping a scammer distracted means protecting another victim. Browning and other scam baiters have attracted so much attention that even though many scammers seem to know their names, they also know they're scraping just the tip of the iceberg. Attracting millions of subscribers, they lure unsuspecting scammers in, waste their time, take their files and disrupt their operations. Over the past couple of years, a growing cohort of scam baiters have found success using YouTube and other video sites to share their exploits. Now the fraud has gotten so big that some people's righteous anger has boiled over into action. Read more: Gift card scams are growing, and retailers aren't doing much about it The retailers he worked with were aware of gift card scams even back then, Roberts added, but it was small enough that "they mostly didn't really care." In exchange, the site would help people track, manage and swap the cards with other users. Back then, the company encouraged people to register their gift cards through his service. "They don't really know who's holding onto these gift cards," said Mark Roberts, who helped co-found the startup Leverage in Southern California nearly two decades ago. They're often embarrassed, and unlike identity theft, where there are strong consumer protections in place, there's almost no way to get their money back. The scope of gift card fraud, where scammers trick people into buying gift cards and handing over the numbers, is especially difficult to pin down because many victims don't report the crime. The lost money equates to an estimated $29.8 billion last year, a staggering jump from the $19.7 billion Truecaller estimated for 2019. The world of online scams has exploded in recent years - in April, a Harris Poll survey of 2,000 Americans commissioned by the app Truecaller found one in three people said they'd fallen victim to a phone scam, and more than half of them said it happened on more than one occasion.
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