For scammers as much as anybody, time is money.
The more time a scammer spends talking to someone without taking their money or information, the less efficient their operation is. If a scammer gets unlucky, and a potential victim smells something fishy at the crucial moment when the scammer is supposed to take their money or information, the minutes, hours or in some cases days that the scammer spent developing that lead is now wasted.
This dynamic, in which some scammers are willing to dump a great deal of time into talking to a potential victim, has inspired a tactic called scambaiting — pretending to fall for fraudulent online schemes in order to waste the time of the perpetrators.
Some scambaiters have posted their exploits on YouTube and other channels to turn them into entertaining content.
A scambaiting story typically starts with a scambaiter — perhaps a small-time vigilante who has a family member who lost money to scammers — receiving a phishing message, such as a text message that supposedly came from a bank.
The scambaiter responds to the message by calling the phone number, pretending to have fallen for the trick and allowing the scammer to lead the conversation along as a normal scam would go.
The difference, however, is that the scambaiter has no intention of sharing real money, real identifying information or anything else of value with the scammer. They are just dragging the conversation out as long as possible, relaying stories about their day, pretending to mess up as they feign doing what the scammer is asking and doing anything else in their power to keep the scammer on the line.
This time wasting can be highly amusing. YouTubers have built careers baiting scammers into raging rants after hours on the phone, hacking the scammers back and taking all manner of revenge in other ways. No single content creator embodies this like Kitboga, the internet alias of a streamer with more than 4 million subscribers across YouTube and streaming platform Twitch. Kitboga has not shared his real identity online.
As Kitboga told the story in a 2020 interview with The Daily Beast, he found out in 2017 that his grandmother had fallen victim to many scams designed to prey on the elderly online and in person. After seeing videos of scambaiters on YouTube, he set out to make his own such videos. In the intervening eight years, he has become the largest YouTuber focusing on this genre of content.
However, Kitboga wanted to go bigger — and not just in terms of viewership or subscribers.
“I’ve been cloning myself for the past five years,” Kitboga said in his latest video. “I had one simple dream: Build the AI that would put me out of a job.”
For every scambaiter like Kitboga in the world, there might be tens, hundreds or even thousands of others a scammer is able to steal from. Kitboga sought to remedy this by recruiting for his side of the scam wars an army of AI bots, trained on scambait phone calls and equipped with artificial voices, that could scale up as large as he wanted.
Not only is it funny to watch a scammer waste their time unwittingly talking to a chatbot designed to waste their time; it is also highly effective. Kitboga has shared anecdotes about scambots keeping scammers on the line for up to three hours at a time, and the bots successfully keeping the same scammers busy multiple days in a row.
Kitboga is far from the first person to identify the power of deploying chatbots against scammers, and he is not the only one doing it. In fact, the field of scambaiting has matured to such an extent that even banks have gotten in on the fun.
In August, Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia,
Rather than doing it for the content, CommBank and Apate.AI are doing it for the actionable intelligence that scambait phone calls can yield. These chatbots are able to both gather information and set traps; they identify the impersonated organizations involved in scam phone calls and provide payment information the bank can use to trace who is perpetrating these scams without fear of actual losses.
“This pilot will be a game-changer in the fight against phone scams,” said Dali Kaafar, executive director of Macquarie University’s cybersecurity hub and CEO of Apate.AI, in a press release at the time. “Our mission is to disrupt scammers’ business models globally. This proactive approach against scam calls will make it much harder for fraudsters to reach actual victims.”
The bank is also working with Optus, a telecommunications company headquartered in a suburb near Sydney, to share text message content relating to scams. This effort has resulted in 470,000 bank impersonation scams getting blocked, according to the bank.
CommBank is also sharing SMS scam intelligence with Vodafone, another telco with a major Australian presence, and the collaborations don’t stop there. The Anti-Scams Intelligence Loop, a project funded by Australia’s four major banks (including CommBank) and coordinated by the nonprofit Australian Financial Crimes Exchange, is helping to speed up intelligence sharing among ecosystem players.
For example, when a bank customer reports a link for a toll payment that looks fishy, the link can be shared very quickly through the loop, and the relevant telco can block any further content being shared more widely. From there, big tech players can block access to the website, and the Australian government’s National Anti-Scam Centre can work to actually take it down.
These efforts are all points of collaboration rather than competition between Australia’s banks, according to James Roberts, general manager of group fraud at CommBank.
“By bringing to the table some of the brightest minds — across telcos, other banks, social media platforms, academics and technologists — we can generate more of these cutting-edge solutions to this very nasty societal problem,” Roberts said in an October press release.
”CommBank was the first entity to integrate with the intel loop,” Roberts said. “As more organizations do the same, especially telcos and social platforms, intelligence sharing via the intel loop will increase and cause real damage to the profit model of scammers.”