Former NASA engineer Mark Rober builds some superior stuff on his YouTube channel, like devious squirrel mazes, however his hottest video sequence is the annual glitter bomb, a superbly over-engineered pretend bundle that douses porch pirates with a bathe of glitter and fart spray. In an sudden twist, last year’s glitter bomb video additionally helped police catch and arrest somebody concerned in a cellphone rip-off scheme, and Rober’s spent the following 12 months digging into simply how these cellphone rip-off operations work. In a brand new video he reveals off the in depth outcomes of that effort, together with hiring double brokers to infiltrate a number of cellphone facilities in India and hacking their safety digicam footage.
And naturally he received off a stink bomb, too.
For Rober, this campaign began when he teamed up with one other YouTuber, Jim Browning, to attempt to ship a glitter bomb to a scammer operation. Browning’s complete channel, which has 3.7 million followers, is dedicated to figuring out the decision facilities behind tech help scams and refund scams. These scams usually goal the aged and fewer computer-savvy of us and normally depend on the scammers gaining distant entry to your laptop after which tricking them into giving up private info like their checking account login. “Refund” scams make folks consider they have been overcompensated with some bogus refund and trick them into sending money within the mail to the scammers.
The individuals who obtain these money packages in the US are basically underlings in these rip-off operations, so after getting a glitter bomb of their palms final 12 months, Rober set his sights on the decision facilities themselves. With Browning’s assist, they have been in a position to acquire entry to the CCTV of the infiltrated name facilities, whereas one other YouTube pair, Trilogy Media, traveled to Kolkata, India to run operations on the bottom.
Trilogy Media’s video focuses on their relationship with the “sleeper brokers” they despatched to work within the name facilities earlier than planting pranks like containers of cockroaches and the basic stink bombs. Browning’s, in the meantime, reveals him in dialog with the scammers, who do not understand he is watching them on CCTV.
The wildest a part of Rober’s video to me is that they have been even in a position to acquire entry to at the very least one of many rip-off operations’ monetary information by watching the boss sort in his laptop password over a safety digicam. Seems that specific operation scams folks out of a mean $65,000 per day, or round $18 million per 12 months.
It is value watching the movies—each for some schadenfreude, and to know what to be on guard towards your self if the scammers ever come calling. As enjoyable because the pranks are, it is irritating realizing that the operations are principally ignored by police, at the very least within the metropolis of Kolkata. However Rober’s crew did have an effect: They really received one other name heart shut down elsewhere within the nation. Hopefully movies like these, which have already racked up thousands and thousands of views, at the very least reduce down on the quantity of people that fall for rip-off calls.
