This fake Bitcoin ATM scheme wasted 4,000 hours of scammers’ time

YouTube and Twitch Streamer locked up just 4,000 hours of con man in an impossible maze that they equip as a way to redeem Bitcoin From their victims.

While designed as a way to waste their time, the kana kitboga said Decryptionit is also his most effective tool for getting information that can be used to punish a malicious actor.

Kit BogaA team of 12 people can offensively search for fraudsters and pretend to be vulnerable on the phone. This is done and created so that they can waste time on the scammers Interesting contentand stop the scheme by collecting details.

In many cases, calls lead to attackers requesting that they send via money Bitcoin ATM—Kitboga has created a fake Bitcoin ATM receipt that can never be redeemed.

“(Bitcoin ATM) can put cash in a machine and it’s the way it’s converted to crypto. So the scammers see it as a way to take your money right away,” Kitoboga said. Decryption. “They are hoping for receipts. So we went to the Bitcoin ATM, got the receipt and took a photo. The QR code links to the fake exchange. The 1-800 number on the receipt is my 1-800 number. This is like the entrance to this maze.”

For more than a year, the fake Bitcoin ATM scheme has locked up around 500 con artists for a total of 164 days and 17 hours, or 3,953 hours. The average time a scammer spends in an infinite maze was less than three hours, with the longest person trying to redeem non-existent Bitcoin in 156 hours, or six and a half days.

What happens in the maze?

The site has a series of infuriating tasks that are tedious to complete, such as a capture that seeks estimates of the number of nuts in the bucket and how high the waves are. Kitboga is currently hosting a challenge to code Captchas, which is time-consuming. That one Ask the user to play the song “Sandstorm” by Dallard On the keyboard.

Ultimately, the scammer is asked to enter a Bitcoin wallet address, which is not handled correctly and is told to call the 1-800 hotline.

This is the beginning of the fun, Kitoboga said. Scammers are forced to navigate the confused automatic menu before entering the last four digits of their Bitcoin wallet. Automated operators always misunderstand. After a few mistakes, the con artists are said to have been transferred to humans by helping them.

“We’ll leave them on hold for about two hours, but no one will come to help them. Or we’ve recorded a fax machine message in the background that answers a call center, but no one can hear it,” Kitoboga said. Decryption. “Imagine waiting for two hours on hold. After that person can’t hear you.”

What’s even worse, while pending, the con artists have to repeat the ridiculous phrases every few minutes to prove that they’re still there. These phrases include “Super Smery Ghost,” “Purple Porcupine,” and “Witty Rattlesnake.”

The hotline intentionally taxes and demands attention, so Kitoboga’s team knows that attackers cannot scam others while they are pending. So the total of 3,953 hours is somewhat conservative as teams only keep on hold or try to resolve tasks on the site in a waste of time.

This is just a basic overview of the fake Bitcoin ATM scheme. Kitboga described it as an infinite maze with doors where his team can turn on or off depending on what he wants to do. Sometimes they just want to waste scammers’ time or create content, while others will want to look for very specific information and take things more seriously.

Kitboga Tod Decryption Infinite Maze ranks him as his second most effective time-wasting tool behind only AI bots that automatically invoke scammers, but it is the most effective tool for collecting Intel. for example, Decryption In an interview, Kitoboga said that scammers are needed to have access to the camera so that the team can identify them.

“This is the most effective tool I have in collecting practical and real information. They don’t give me a GPS position on the phone,” he explained. “When I think these scammers are getting closer to getting $30,000 or whatever from a reputable crypto exchange, they sometimes give me a big wallet that goes through all the ciphers, which is a big mistake on their part.

The streamer claims they helped attackers freeze funds because they store the code in a reputable exchange. Kraken is affiliated with Kitboga To share intelligence, exchanges will help fund Scambaiter’s operations.

Now he’s expanding his options to waste time as a con man. The Kitboga team is currently developing a similar endless maze for scammers seeking gift cards and cash to send them to.

Why do you do this?

Kitboga said he began trolling scammers more than eight years ago.Hello, this is Lenny. ”

It was the first time he had heard of a technical support scammer. He immediately thought of his grandparents who had dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and believed they had fallen into it, especially considering that they had been scamed in the past.

“We know they’re going to fall into a technical support scam, so we might be able to do something about it,” Kitboga said. Decryption. “If I spent 15 minutes on the phone with a scammer, it was 15 minutes when they weren’t talking to someone else’s grandma. That was my weapons call.”

At first, he simply called the scammers and wasted time over the weekend as a “passion project.” When his friends wanted to see, he began streaming the interaction so they could laugh together. One day, a clip was shared on Reddit and he began to gain an audience. This ultimately left his job as a software engineer and became a full-time Scambaiter.

“I remember clearly telling one of my friends that I was working with on software that it only took a year,” Kitoboga said of Pivot. “You know, it’s like a year’s thing. You need to shoot your shot. People think this is cool. Maybe I can educate thousands of people about scams.”

Eight years later, he has 1.2 million people. Convulsions Followers, 3.74 million subscribers and almost 1 billion viewers on YouTube. It’s over a few thousand people.

“It was a really fun journey,” he finished.