Yeah. Well it’s kind of complicated so I’m going to make separate paragraphs.
1: How did Scammer HotLine find scammer numbers?
If you have ever used that service, you might’ve noticed, depending on the time that you call them, that you get different numbers. Since I am in Europe, when I called them in my normal hours, I got European scammers - they were Indian but targeted Europeans - and most of them were terrible at speaking Spanish, French, German, Dutch or whatever country they were targeting. But when it was normal hours in the us, us scammers picked up.
So, how did that software find numbers?
Well, it didn’t really find numbers, like you would find from a technical support popup scam, or a e-Mail from Amazon saying that they charged you and you need to ring the number that they posted in order to cancel it, it was actually kinda different. You see, the person who ran that “service” got numbers from scammers that he had access to. They were in their systems and called the numbers that they saw. ReconScammers actually made a post on that and recently updated it and he said "Don’t delete scammers’s files if you reverse a connection on scammer hotline. That was because if you syskey’d them or did damage and they realized it, they would reset their PCs. And if they did reset their PCs, midnight scambait and/or reconscammers would lose access and therefore wouldn’t be able to monitor them anymore
So, let’s go back to the original question: Why did they shut down?
Well, mainly because people kept deleting scammers’s files and damaging their operations, and as a result of that reconscammers and midnight scambaits lost a lot of connections. So they decided to shut it down. And no, it’s not under maintenance, I don’t know why it says that, it says it when I call it too but it’s permanently shut down.
It was a good experience, but everything good must come to an end, I guess.
I hope that this made everything clear!