Meet the scambaiters beating fraudsters at their own game

• Scambaiters try to waste as much of criminals’ time and money as possible
• Here two scambaiters open up to This is Money about the tricks of the trade  

In a car park somewhere on the rugged Cornish coast, a Ghanian scammer stands shivering and confused. He has been sent here to collect the payment for 10kg of non-existent gold promised to the victim of one of his scams. 

The fraudster is expecting to get £234,000 in cash. It’s a massive sum, by far outweighing the costs of the 6,000 mile round trip from the Ghanian capital, Accra.

The problem is that he has been waiting for longer than he’d like, and there is still no sign of the money. In fact, his victim hasn’t even shown up.

Hidden in a car nearby, a man congratulates himself on a job well done: another scammer taken on a so-called ‘safari’, and with photos to prove it.

‘That was great fun…that cost them a few thousand dollars to organise,’ the mastermind told This is Money.

The man in question is a scambaiter, someone who manipulates fraudsters into wasting their time or money.

The scambaiting community is understandably secretive, and one of its most famous members will only speak to This is Money using the alias of Mr Pricky. 

Mr Pricky runs a YouTube channel, ScamBait Central, on which he shares videos of his attempts to take scammers for a ride.

‘We’re not really caped crusaders,’ Mr Pricky insists, ‘We dislike scammers, we loathe them and we loathe what they do to ordinary people in society.

‘I can’t say that we do it purely to do good. We do it because we have a lot of fun. It can be very satisfying.’

According to the scambaiter, they do their best to occupy as much of a scammer’s time as possible: ‘It could be days. It could be weeks, months, even years. Some scambaiters have had scammers on the hook for five, even as much as 10 years,’ he said.

‘It can be quite cathartic, but also it helps to keep them away from real prospective victims,’ he added.

However, the business of scambaiting is not just about having a laugh, and the consequences of being careless could be serious.

‘The criminals we bait can be very dangerous and violent, and some of them are murderous, he said. ‘I get death threats often, and some of them I take seriously.’

Because of this, he doesn’t talk about his scambaiting, even to friends or family.

‘Very few people actually know about it, but I’m a very private person, because I was with the with the Ministry of Defence for over 20 years, and I’ve been a Samaritan for 34 years,’ he said. ‘So confidentiality and keeping my mouth shut has been the cornerstone of most of my adult life.’

The only one who does know? ‘My accountant’, came the reply.

On top of being careful, Mr Pricky says that his scambaiter community follows a strict set of guidelines.

His community rules include that scambaiters should not ‘burn’ the scammers by giving away that they are being duped. They should also never involve innocent third parties.

The scambaiter added: ‘We discovered very early on in our community, which was formed in 2003, that [burning them] educated scammers, and they learned from the mistakes that we were gleefully pointing out.’

‘They became better scammers and more likely to rob your grandparents blind the next time round.’

His group also avoid taking scammers’ money, never send any them copies of IDs and never report their email addresses.

‘The scammer will open a new email account within three minutes and start scamming again,’ he said, ‘but because they’re using a new address, the address that they were using before that we’ve posted on a scam warning site is now redundant.’

Another scambaiter, SkeletonSyskey, is clear on what drives him.

‘My motivation was to find who these people are and see what I can do to stop them,’ he told This is Money.

‘I want to do this, I’ve got to do this as much as I can,’ he said, ‘I have more drive for this than I do for my actual work.

‘I do put in many hours each week, in a way it is more than a job. In the past when I have had jobs, I’ve been the kind of person to do 9 to 5, get paid and then I just separate myself from my work when I get home. I don’t tend to talk shop.

‘With this it is different.’

 There are people in scambaiting I’ve known for over a decade, and I don’t even know their first name

When he first started, SkeletonSyskey was acting as a carer for his father, who has Alzheimer’s, so he found that he had free time to focus on scambaiting.

‘Since then, the channel has become quite a bit bigger, and I’ve found that I now have to dedicate a lot of time to this,’ he said.

‘My father is now in a care home and being looked after, freeing up more time to do this, but I also have to do my normal job.’

The scambaiter has more than 15,000 subscribers on YouTube.

SkeletonSyskey began by reporting the scammers he uncovered to Action Fraud, finding the name of the company that was trying to scam him.

‘My plan at the start was to find out who these companies were and report them,’ he said. ‘In the beginning I would report them straight away to Action Fraud.’

‘I provided the phone call as evidence, but I heard nothing back from Action Fraud. A few years later another scambaiter ended up doing a video on the exact same company, and I realised that company was still active.’

The lack of action by the authorities was frustrating, he said. ‘I found that it is better to speak to other scambaiters to get more information on them and then try to get them shut down,’ he added.

They may not consider themselves caped crusaders, but there is something superhero-esque about scambaiters’ double lives – perhaps their hidden identities and their altruistic desire to help others by distracting scammers.

But being a scambaiter also comes at a price, as it requires individuals to hide their real details at all costs.

Unsurprisingly, SkeletonSyskey’s exploits go unnoticed by those around him, hidden behind his digital likeness in the form of a Shiba Inu dog.

‘It’s a fine balance,’ he said, ‘I have learned to separate what I do here on YouTube to what I am up to in real life.

‘Only my brother knows, to be honest. The only reason he knows is that he walked in once while I was speaking to scammers on the phone.

‘It doesn’t feel like I’m hiding it, but I don’t talk about it with friends and family, there are always other things to talk about. I’m always busy living a normal life.’

 

‘There are people in scambaiting I’ve known for over a decade, and I don’t even know their first name,’ Mr Pricky told me. ‘I don’t know what they do for a living. I don’t know about their familial backgrounds.

‘We are very secretive.’

How to avoid losing out to scammers 

What do scammers look for in a victim?

When looking for a potential victim, scammers tick off a mental checklist. If you fall under one these categories then they might class you as having a vulnerability they can exploit.

Scammers tend to target the isolated, such as people who don’t have close family that will talk them out of going along with something.

On top of this, the ideal target may be retired and in possession of considerable savings, and likely single, a widow or a widower, meaning that they could be a potential victim of a romance scam.

Unscrupulous as they are, scammers will also target the desperate and needy, SkeletonSyskey said.

‘As soon as they call someone, if they can hear that it is an elderly person, or someone who doesn’t seem like they know a lot about computers, that is the first point they think that they might be able to make some money,’ he said.

Mr Pricky added: ‘The scammers will then offer them all sorts of schemes, with a small amount of money to be sent, and then it’s a bit like gambling. You put some money in a fruit machine and you don’t win, you think “Well, I’ve lost some money now, but if I put a few more coins in, I might get that back”.

‘They’ll often start very low. They might ask for just £40 or £50, but they know once you’ve sent that, and they come up with a good excuse for why you haven’t got your fortune yet, you’ll send a bit more.’

What are the red flags you should look out for?

‘If somebody promises you millions online, it’s a scam. It is as black and white as that. Just forget it,’ Mr Pricky said.

With the 419 scams that he engages with, the instant giveaway is that a scammer will promise you a fortune, and then tell you that you need to send them money in advance in order to secure it.

 If the scammers are hysterical, then it isn’t legitimate – you can tell if a company is legitimate by the way they deal with you on the phone

Often, these scams come in the form of an elaborate backstory designed to throw you off guard, such as that you have a relative who has died abroad and you are a beneficiary, or you have won the lottery.

‘The types of scam are limited only by the ingenuity of the scammers themselves,’ he said.

The most obvious sign of a scam, SkeletonSyskey said, is simple spelling mistakes in an email, or strangely constructed sentences.

What options are open to you if you think you are being scammed?

Despite all your caution, you might find yourself in the midst of what you think is a scam, having brushed off any early warning signs.

But it isn’t too late to stop the scammer before they get a hold of your hard-earned cash.

According to SkeletonSyskey, if you have given a scammer access to your PC, then your first course of action should be to turn off any internet connection, before uninstalling any remote access software that they have asked you to download.

If you are on the phone to a scammer, however, the key is to stay calm. If you aren’t sure if the call is legitimate, tell them you are going to hang up and will call them back.

Trying to keep you on the hook, a scammer will likely become frantic.

‘If it is a scammer on the line, they’ll say: “no no no, we have to do this now, we have to stop the hackers”,’ SkeletonSyskey says, ‘A legitimate company will say: “that’s fine, take your time and call us back when you are ready”.

‘If the scammers are hysterical, then it isn’t legitimate – you can tell if a company is legitimate by the way they deal with you on the phone.’

Once you have hung up, it is best to find an official number from the website of the company that the scammer says they are from and call back using that.

Mr Pricky added that there are ways you can protect others from facing the same fate.

He said: ‘If they’re in your social media accounts, block them and tell your friends about them, because they will also have befriended some of your friends. They’re always looking for new marks. Get them out of your life.’

The details of the scam can also be added to scam warning sites such as the fraudfighters.online forum. This can prevent others from falling for the scam in future if they search for a scammer’s email address or phone number online.

Unfortunately, Mr Pricky said that ‘if you sent money, then you’ve almost invariably lost it.’

Scammers use money transfer services like Western Union to transfer funds across the world, meaning that there is little that can be done if your money has made it to Africa or Asia.

Still, he suggests reporting it to your bank, through which you might be able to recover your funds.

How can you avoid falling for a scam?

‘The most common mistake is to reply to their email or their social media message,’ Mr Pricky said.

SkeletonSyskey agrees. He said: The most common mistake is not taking the time to read most of the information you have. With emails, they will see an image for an invoice from a company like Amazon and just click it. Then it all begins.’

The best advice, in fact, is to reduce your attractiveness as a target.

Mobile phones are often overlooked as a window to fraud, SkeletonSyskey said, with the devices now offering scammers access to banking apps, social media and two-factor authentication.

‘There are so many people that don’t even think about what can happen through your phone,’ he said. ‘They don’t realise how easy it will be to work out where they live, who their relatives are. It is rare you see someone install anti-virus software on a phone.’

‘As a general principle, one should be very careful about how one leaves one’s footprint online,’ Mr Pricky echoed.

‘Your social media account, particularly Facebook should be locked down so that only friends can see what you’ve got in there… [scammers] can go right through Facebook accounts. I get victims contacting me through my Facebook page, I look at their Facebook accounts and I can see everything.’