Levis's Tech, Hoax Hotel, and other scambaiters

I'm sure most of you have come across at least a few popups like this while you're trying to watch porn:


They either ask you to call a number, or download their antiwirus program to clean your dextop. Of course, you don't actually have any wiruses on your dextop, they're just trying to scam you into wiring them hundreds of dollars or handing over your credit card information. When you call them, the Microsoft Certihwied Teckneeshun will ask you, in broken Indian English, to do one thing, download TeamViewer so they can connect to your computer. Then they open cmd and run the tree command, pretending that all of your directories are actually wiruses. They might open eventvwr and show you a bunch of scary looking but perfectly harmless error messages.
As you can see, my computer currently has 2,925 wiruses. Once they've convinced you that your machine is full of so many wiruses that it's about to explode, they offer to fix each and everything for you for a one time charge of $X99.99. If you refuse, they'll run syskey and encrypt your hard drive so you have to pay them to get your files back.

These scammers are generally pretty funny, both for the bullshit they spew about all your wiruses and their tenuous grasp of the English language. Fortunately, there are people who call these guys up and play along so we can laugh at them for being foreigners and trying to feed their kids.



Of course tech support scams aren't the only funny scams out there, there's the classic 419/Nigerian prince scam (wire me a few hundred dollars so I can pay some legal fees and I'll split a billion with you), the IRS/CRA scam (you owe thousands to the IRS or CRA, send it by MoneyGram or go to jail), money flip scams (I work for Western Union and I know a trick to edit the amount of a transaction, send me $400 and I'll edit it to be $4000 and send it back), and plenty of others. The Hoax Hotel does videos about all these other types of scammers and they're also pretty funny



And of course, there are plenty of other scambaiting channels out there. Anyone else ever watch these videos?

 

It's kind of sad how people are stupid enough to fall into those scams even today. I mean it's not as much the technical naiveté that dumbfounds me but how people can just think "oh someone told me something and it involves large quantities of moneys? OH KEY!!! IS TRUE DEN". Also how come these are not sued for millions more often? I imagine it's pretty easy tracking whoever registered that phone number in the US and open up legal action, if you're a government agency like the FBI or even police.

There's a site whose sole purpose is to troll these guys - but not for the lulz like posted in the OP but with the mentality that "as long as I can get this guy to waste a ton of time on me, it's a ton of time not wasted on an innocent victim". They have a few stories where they managed to to do things like get the scammer's family to write dozens of hand-written letters for some made-up reason or another - because once some guy in India thinks he's getting ten thousand US dollars easy like that, he's bound to go to great lengths himself if he really believe he's close to becoming quite rich. Totally worth a read http://www.419eater.com/

 

I remember watching one of these scambaiter videos where the guy feigned short term memory loss & he kept forgetting the conversation he just had and starts taking stabs at the dark, & the scammer goes along with it. Has anybody ever tried giving these guys credit card info to unactivated gift cards? I imagine the frustration of the scammer not being able to withdraw money from an existing card would be great.