The so-called "advance-fee scam", often called "Nigerian scam" or "419 scam" (which refers to the penal code of Nigeria that makes it illegal) has been a bane of the world for at least a century. It's often called "Nigerian scam" because, while scammers can be from pretty much anywhere in the world, it has always been especially prevalent in Nigeria for some reason. The most technically correct term is "advance-fee scam". It takes many forms, but it always works pretty much in the same way: You get an email (before the internet an actual physical mail letter), nowadays sometimes a browser popup from a dubious website or even a robocall, telling that you can receive millions of dollars (the most common alleged source being some African royalty member or associate who wants to transfer that money overseas). When someone responds to such an email, there's a back and forth exchange between the victim and the scammer (sometimes even over the phone) that tries to make it sound as legit as possible. However, once the victim has been hooked, the scam begins: In order to receive the money, the victim has to send money to the scammer first. Usually the excuse is that the scammer has to pay some fees (or bribes) in order to be able to transfer or get hold of the money. If the victim sends the money, there quickly comes another request for more money. And then another, and then another, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, for as long as the victim is willing to pay.
Gullible and vulnerable people (especially old people) can get so hooked into such a scam that they send astonishing amounts of money to the scammers. In the worst cases a victim has sent literally tens of thousands of US dollars. In one particular example one victim started sending the scammers money owned by the company she was a treasurer of (thinking that once she gets the money from the scammer she would return the money to the company). Without telling the company. In other words, illegally. She sent several hundreds of thousands of dollars to the scammers before she got caught. (She was sued for stealing company money.)
Some people get so hooked into the scam that they won't stop sending money even if someone notices and explains to them that it's a scam, and how it works. (In these cases the victim usually thinks that it's just someone who is jealous trying to stop him or her from getting all that money. Sometimes the victim may, quite ironically, think that the good samaritan is the one trying to scam him or her.)
The advance-fee scam is, however, quite a slow way to defraud people of money. It usually takes at a very minimum many days, often weeks, for the victim to send just some tiny amounts of money (in the order of a hundred US dollars or so). While this is still a millions-of-dollars-per-year illegal business, it's nevertheless a quite inefficient way.
In the era of the internet scammers have gotten much smarter than that, and have come up with ways to scam people that are orders of magnitude more efficient. We are not talking about perhaps a hundred dollars per week per victim. We are talking about a thousand dollars per hour per victim. That's a hefty hourly salary. A scammer could theoretically become a millionaire in about 6 months (especially since all the revenue is tax-free, as it's all obtained illegally.)
These scams are based on the scammers calling people and convincing them to send the scammer gift cards (in some forms of the scam even literal money via mail, although the gift card scam is much more efficient). There are many forms of the scam (such as the "tech support" scam and the "IRS" scam), but by far the most common and most effective one is the refund scam.
Millions of people get robocalled, or get a browser popup (from dubious websites), or an email, telling them that their "subscription" to something is going to be renewed, or that some order on Amazon has been placed on their name, or any of a multitude of variants of this, and if the person wants to cancel the subscription or order, to call a particular phone number. Some people call, the scammer then instructs the victim to download a desktop sharing software into their computers and to give the scammer full access, after which the scammer instructs the victim to log into his or her bank account to "check that the refund was successful". The scammer will then edit the HTML of the bank webpage (which can be done with any browser) to make it look like way too much was transferred, usually in the several thousands of dollars, after which the scammer will put up a show about how he's going to get fired, and then asks the victim to return the money by buying gift cards (all kinds of excuses will be made why it can't be paid with a bank transfer or via credit card, and the gift cards are the only option.)
(While it might sound strange at first, the reason why they don't want bank transfers or credit card payments is because those can be reversed and traced if and most probably when the victim finds out it was all a fraud. The gift cards are 100% anonymous and irreversible, and have the advantage that they can be "given" to the scammer by simply reading out the code on the back of the card, or sending a picture of it. Scammers don't get 100% of the value of the gift card on the black market, but they do get a good chunk of it, and that's enough because of the value of the gift cards, which is in the thousands of dollars, and their sheer amount.)
Scambaiting, which is people "scamming the scammers", or more commonly just wasting their time by pretending to be victims for as long as possible, has been a thing for many decades (from at least the 1990's), but with the advent of the refund scams (which happen invariably over the phone) and online streaming, it has become a booming "industry" of sorts. The most common reason for doing this is to just waste the scammers' time: As long as they are trying to lure the scambaiter they aren't doing so to an actual victim.
Also, if at all possible, scambaiters will try to get information on the scammers in order to report to the authorities. For example, if they get any bank accounts to which victims are transferring any money to, they will report those to the bank and the authorities to have it closed. Some scambaiters go a lot farther, even hacking into the computers of the scammers and trying to sabotage them in any way they can (such as deleting all the files) and, if possible, gather information for the authorities.
Of course that last thing is, unfortunately, usually not very successful because authorities usually don't give a flying fuck. The vast, vast majority of refund scammers are in India (which seems to be the world capital for such scams), and the Indian police extremely rarely does anything to such scammer individuals or organizations because they don't give a fuck (even though such scams are illegal even in India). But at least in one particular instance a scam center was shut down by the police because the press got involved and thus it got such publicity that the Indian police had to act.
One of the most famous scambaiters currently is Kitboga, who pretty much makes a living by streaming the scambaiting. He, however, mostly concentrates only on wasting scammers' time, and only occasionally eg. reports bank accounts to the authorities. Another famous scambaiter who actually does significantly more "investigative journalism" and reporting is Scammer Payback. One of the most amazing scambaiters, however, is Jim Browning, who has done a great deal of activism to help victims, stop scams from happening, hack and sabotage the computer systems of the scammers, and even shut down scam centers (which is the example I mentioned above).
All this raises a question, though: People like Jim Browning are doing this on their own free time, out of the goodness of their heart, with no compensation and with extremely limited resources. Yet sometimes they are able to even bring down entire scam centers.
So the question is: Why don't governments do this? Why is it up to individual people to do this on their free time, with no budgets, compensation or anything? Governments would have vast amounts of people and resources to do this, and an enormous amount of leverage to pressure eg. the Indian authorities to do something about the scam centers that are discovered.
"It's too small of a thing for the government to bother, they have better things to do" is most definitely not a valid argument. These scams are literally a billion-dollar illegal industry. The police will go after people who steal some tens of dollars, but they will not do anything to stop literally billions of dollars from being defrauded from the citizens of the country? The police will investigate and even perform year-long sting operations on people defrauding significantly less money, but they don't do anything about these scammers, even though they could.
"They can't do anything about scammers overboard" is not a valid excuse either, as demonstrated by people like Jim Browning, who can bring down entire scam centers on his free time with no governmental backing. How much more could an entire governmental agency do (especially since they can pressure the Indian authorities much more effectively than some individual nobody or even a media company)? The government would have significantly more resources to find out where the scammers are located and what they are doing, and would have direct contacts to the authorities of the country.
I can't understand why they aren't doing anything about it. They will put people in jail for using the wrong pronouns online, but they will not do anything to scammers defrauding billions of dollars from people.
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