Online scams: 3 rules to prevent being conned

0:02 – 1:37

Inside the scam call center, and the man wasting their time

It opens in a darkly comic place: a fake support voice saying, "thank you for calling support," while the report explains that many of today’s online scams come from organized call centers in India, far beyond the FBI’s reach. That detail matters because it explains the frustration behind modern scam fighting. If law enforcement cannot easily reach the operators, one defense is to disrupt them before they reach victims. That is where Kitboga comes in. He is introduced as a kind of civilian counter-force, using a pseudonym, a voice changer, and a lot of patience. His method sounds almost ridiculous until you hear the logic: "my job is to waste as much time as possible with scammers on the phone so they're not on the phone with somebody else and then hopefully educate people about how this game works." That is the unexpected angle here. He is not just trolling for entertainment. He is treating scammer attention like a scarce resource and trying to burn it. The concrete trick is simple but effective. He changes his voice, sometimes sounding like a sweet older woman, sometimes inventing odd characters on the fly. He admits, very plainly, that he often just "wing[s] it" and tries to have fun. But underneath the humor is a sharper strategy: pull scammers off their script. The moment they lose the script, they stop sounding like smooth professionals and start sounding human, shaky, conflicted, even trapped. Kitboga says he sometimes asks, "what do you want your kids to be when they grow up?" and then twists the knife: "I bet they want to be just like you." In one response, a scammer’s voice cracks and he says, "no I I don't want them to be like me I want to come out from the dark but I cannot." That moment reframes the whole story. The scam is not just a technical trick. It is a human system, and the script is what keeps it running.