Posted on 02/02/2025 6:38:13 AM PST by Red Badger
Ever wonder who the sociopaths are you see in Netflix documentaries, catfishing people from the internet using dating apps?
Well, look no further. Australia’s News.com.au profiled one such person this week, a young worker inside of a “mass scamming call center”.
The person, named “Beard”, said that he “fled war-torn Syria for Dubai” and was desperately looking for work. Thinking he landed an advertising role, he told news.com.au he found himself at a “bizarre office location in the middle of the Dubai desert where those inside tried to confiscate his passport”.
He was eventually held captive and forced to scam people for a living, the report says.
Then he became part of a large-scale “pig butchering” romance scam operation, designed to swindle unsuspecting victims out of their money. News.com.au said this type of fraud devastates thousands of Australians annually.
Beard worked night shifts, 12 hours a day, six days a week, pretending to be a woman named Annie to deceive victims. The scam center housed over 1,000 workers, mostly foreign migrants from Africa and India, all controlled by a Chinese-run syndicate. Workers were confined to the premises, only leaving to buy food from vendors serving the scammers.
Victims, already catfished on dating apps, believed they were chatting with a woman who led a glamorous lifestyle. Beard’s job was to extract financial information and convince them to invest in cryptocurrency.
“It’s not the important information I give them,” he explained. “It’s the important information I got out of them.”
A real woman, half-Turkish, half-Ukrainian, was employed to take brief video calls to reassure victims they weren’t being scammed. “She had a line of people waiting for her to also talk to other victims.”
Beard typically juggled 12 victims at once before handing them over to another team that finalized the scam, the report said.
Despite working inside the operation, Beard never scammed anyone. Instead, he deliberately stalled conversations and warned victims about the risks of crypto investments.
Inspired by YouTube scam-buster Jim Browning, he secretly sent videos and photos from inside the scam center. When he finally decided to leave, he tricked the scammers into letting him go by claiming he needed to return home.
After he left, the scam center eventually shut down.
“The joke is that these scams gave me an incentive to work for them,” he concluded. “Like I had a bed, Wi-Fi, electricity, and water all covered. If someone gets a legal job with worse conditions, they’d be incentivized to go back to the scam centers.”
Ping!...........
PEGGY!................
There’s a job for the Trump CIA... take scammers down all over the world with enough prejudice to make all others shut down. It’s a huge economic impact preying on the weak.
I was actually catfished on Facebook, with this exact modus operandi. An attractive ‘woman’ wanted to tell me all about cryptocurrency.
I have a live-in girlfriend, so there was no interest on my part, in either the fake chick or the crypto.
I get those same ‘messages’ on ‘X’ all the time.
I just delete and block them..............
BTTT
How about just informing the local authorities of the location of the miscreants and let them take care of it, or else..............WE WILL.............
I’m surprised the Sheikh hasn’t cracked down. He’s trying to run a high class country where only those who are stealing billions are allowed to operate.
I wish we’d go after these people even more than we do. They are fun to screw with. At my old company we had test accounts from every credit card known to man, and I’d use one of those when I got a call from someone who wanted to sell a warranty or fix my computer. They’d cuss you out and we made a game of it sometimes at the office to see who could get a scammer pissed first. Once, we conferenced in two on the same call. That was entertaining for about a minute.
Ever wonder who the sociopaths are you see in Netflix documentaries, catfishing people...
Sociopath? Heartless, yes. Don’t know about sociopath.
I knew Israeli Americans who did this in Isreal...called elderly Americans as the prime target.
And it’s done in India, Russia, a lot of Eastern European countries...a LOT of African countries...
It needs to be crushed.
But only by hitting the governments hard will it stop.
Cause almost EVERYONE is in on taking advantage of vulnerable Americans
and it needs to stop
Trump has an opportunity to change America again by eliminating spam calls.
The Deep State will fight him on it.
I get maybe 10 calls a week from “Mary” wanting to “tell me” about medicare. Now the name has changed and some guy who can barely speak English tries. I hang up or let it go to voicemail where they hang up before saying a word.
We have caller ID at work, so if I don’t recognize the number I let it go to VM..................
I believe Lazamataze was the master of the scam turnaround with the Nigerian scammers back in the day. Very funny stuff.
This seems to be the pattern. They also have major operations out of northern Burma and in Cambodia. The scammer you actually talk to is little better than a slave. Someone needs to take out the bosses running these ops, but the communist party in China is probably being paid off as part of the operations.
With extreme prejudice ...
It’s amazing how many of these are based on the greed of the mark. My aunt got taken for everything by a sweepstakes scammer. They even sent her a picture of her door in assisted living.
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