Former nasa engineer shares how he gets even with scammers

HOW SOPHISTICATED ARE THE CRIMINAL ORGANIZATIONS YOU ENCOUNTERED? If Microsoft was remotely running their call center in India, it wouldn’t look a lot different from these scam call centers.

These [scam] companies optimize the best way to make outbound calls and basically are salespeople. But instead of, say, trying to sell you auto insurance, they’re convincing you that

something is wrong and that you need to take action for some fictitious scenario. WAS THE KOLKATA MISSION RISKY TO YOUR LOCAL AGENTS? If I knew what I know now, I don’t know if I would have

done it. The call center owners are criminals. They make about $20 million a year — and to some people, human life is worth less than $20 million. They could, at the very least, rough

someone up to try to protect their assets. On the other side, for a lot of those agents, who are ex-scammers, it was personal. They had seen firsthand the devastation that this industry

causes to a lot of people. WHAT LED YOU FROM PURSUING PORCH PIRATES TO GOING AFTER INTERNATIONAL PHONE FRAUD? I was in the middle of putting together a glitter bomb and kept getting

[interrupted by] a bunch of spam calls. I like using engineering anywhere there is justice to be pursued. Any time you can find someone like that to mess with, it’s perfect, because

everyone’s going to be rooting for you. And it feels really cathartic. WHY DO YOU THINK CRIMINAL CALL CENTERS TARGET OLDER AMERICANS? One of their tactics is to overwhelm and pressure

people, especially when it comes to technology. On average, older Americans are less technologically savvy because they didn’t grow up with it. Also, they have worked most of their lives, so

some older people have a lot of money — or at least more than a 20-year-old. It’s a combination of those two things. A rat escapes into a scam call center in India Courtesy Mark Rober YOU

AVOID VICTIM BLAMING. The people who think they’re too smart to get scammed tend to be the people who feel so foolish when it does happen, that they don’t report it. There is something to be

said about destigmatizing getting scammed. Scammers simply get people on the wrong day, at the wrong time. DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE WAYS TO FIGHT FRAUD THAT LAW ENFORCEMENT CANNOT? I have been

told that by multiple law enforcement agencies. If you name all the major law enforcement agencies, at least one person from each has reached out to us to ask questions, or for evidence or

techniques. It’s an arm’s race, though, because scammers change their tactics. Hopefully, we can tip the balance back, at least temporarily, in favor of the victims.