Any new, less common scambaiting techniques?

I already know about swearing at them in Hindi, pretending to fall for their scam, etc but do you guys know any techniques that aren’t as well known? Thanks!

If you want to have fun with the scammers, you can play some music at them.

And you can always play super dumb person who doesn't know anything. 😂

@PlayerFridei#135291 Can you Change your microphone input to your desktop input in Textnow?

@CGColin#135303 Yes. If you have voicemeeter or virtual cable.

https://www.vb-audio.com/Voicemeeter/banana.htm

As mentioned by PlayerFridei, not just act dumb. Act like you’re borderline technologically inept. Only able to turn on the machine, open browser, type in Facebook or other social media. Avoid technical terms unless you’re parroting them to have them describe them to get them in a “gotcha” when you pull off the mask of your persona.

Going “conspiracy theory” nutjob or MLM junkie wouldn’t hurt either for one “victim” persona and may even be fun.

@Gibnez#135290 Yes, we need more investigative scambaiters:

If you do investigative scambaiting and want to really expose them and get them arrested don’t immediately blow your cover and insult them. Instead, continue to bait and try to gather as much information as possible. That includes:

:point_right: their different phone numbers and call back numbers: Ask them what phone number you can reach them on and if they have any alternative number because this current number you’re calling on has sometimes a waiting queue and you don’t want to wait.

:point_right: their different websites: ask them for their website, later on google search their phone numbers and try to find as many websites that are having these numbers on as possible. Do WHOIS lookups on https://www.whois.com/ and see if there’s any valuable information

:point_right: save evidence: Record calls and/or your screen when they’re connected with you to save evidence of them breaking laws: Do they claim to be Microsoft? Do they show stopped services, tree cmd, eventvwr? Are they claiming your PC has viruses when it’s in fact a clean VM? Save all these evidence as call recs or video recs and upload them to YouTube. Also, save a snapshot of their websites and their popup if you have using WayBackMachine (https://web.archive.org/). Just input the URL there and that’s it. That way even if the scammers take down their website you still can search through the archive and you enable Microsoft and other investigators to follow your evidence and see the connections.

:point_right: try to get their real company name: sometimes it shows on their domain registration (-> WHOIS lookup) or IP address. These are harder to get these days since not even Teamviewer connections reveal the partner’s IP anymore (afaik). You could try sending them Grabify links.

:point_right: count & name the employees by repeatedly calling them again: this is to determine the call center size and to make it possible for Microsoft to find patterns. Victims often report the agent’s name so by this Microsoft may be able to link different cases.

:arrow_forward: This information should be submitted to Microsoft using this link here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/concern/scam :arrow_backward:

If you have more information that doesn't fit in their forms, create a scammer.info discussion, post all the additional information there and insert the link to it in the Microsoft report.
*It is actually helping!* We have a case of a user here who reported scammers to Microsoft in April 2019 and a few months back he received an email by Microsoft that, also based on his submitted information, Microsoft / FBI arrested 3 Indian nationals in New York. You could be the next one who manages to do this!

I personally like to just call a number and mute myself and wait for them to hang up when they realize it’s nothing but silence coming from my end. I do it over and over and over and over and over and over again. They block my number, I create a new number in TextNow… and do it over and over and over and over and over again. Block my number, and create a new number and… you get the picture. The scammers lose their fucking minds after not hearing anybody on the other end after 3+ hours.