Im just curious if you all think we are actually denting scammer revenue with our scam baiting. There are so many potential low wage Indian employees, and only so many of us, and most of us, with limited time.
As a newbie, Ive only done a few scambait calls myself, but so far, I dont think Ive had a single scammer who fully realized what I was doing even after coming clean, and none of them where looking very hard for signs of virtual machines; so if it wasnt the first time he or she got baited, at least it would be rather uncommon. And thus unfortunately, hardly material to their revenue?
That doesnt mean I think we shouldnt do be doing this, after all, its fun to do, and every scam we can prevent is better than one that works, but Im not sure if just keeping them busy really makes an impact. RATing them and potentially getting law enforcement involved is a different story, Im merely talking about wasting their time.
@Vertigo#88985 It heavily depends on their size but the email requests that we Scammer.info staff receive from scammers and real businesses alike to get their number removed already shows that we make a difference. Obviously we try to prevent legit real businesses to be posted here as much as possible but when they email us or we engage in a call with them for clarification, even if the thread with the number was live for just 1h or so, they complained about maybe 70ish calls made by people. Obviously I feel bad for the legit companies but this gives some insight as to what power our community has.
But of course the impact that we do also heavily depends on how big the scam call center is and how many people call the same call center. If the call center is just 5 guys sitting in their appartment we'll make quite some big impact and might stop them from working at all.
Or the other end of the spectrum, if the call center has hundreds of agents then you can make many calls without even reaching the same agent twice and nobody will even realize that they're getting scambaited.
That e.g. CheapFlightsFares or MyPhoneSupport have involved lawyers against this forum shows already that even big call centers are getting affected to the point that they're willing to spend money on attorneys and lawyers to pursue this. So even companies of that size seem to be affected by it. And I believe that is a good thing.
Every scammer that is kept busy by a scambaiter is a success. You're not alone. The whole forum is with you and doing the same and together we *do* make an impact!
@Vertigo#88985 It takes time for a scammer to ident a VM, time that they do not have.
Scammers go through a LOT of "bad leads"... not just scambaiters like us wasting their time but potential victims who end up rejecting the scammer's advances.
Wasted time == wasted dollars to a scammer. Those phone agents have to be paid or they'll quit. Scammers are not minimum-wage employees at these call centers. Most of them are paid above-average (some scammer operations will use a mix of highly paid guys and a front-line bottom-barrel staff which is common in tech support scams). The psychological abuse that scammers get is pretty high---from people rejecting their advances.
I see the complaints in FWC about IRS/SSA scammers and they sometimes mention the Toyota Corolla. You know it takes nearly 30-40 minutes of the scammer reading off that script before they get to the Toyota Corolla with the traces of blood in it.
Scammers are like panhandlers... they're panhandling for payoffs. That's also why you have some scammers who are very quick to hangup--they want to find the next victim.
As far as quantitatively adding up all the baiting going on---that's hard to do because it's a hard discipline to keep track of calling.