I keep seeing scam-baiters struggle to talk to victims when they intercept a scam. They always struggle with what to call themselves, trying to explain what scam-baiting is. They should just call themselves a “fraud investigator” because it’s literally what they’re doing, and it’s clear and concise (“fraud investigator” isn’t an official title with requisite certifications and such to get in trouble for using that title).<\/p>\n
Also, they should start with “we’ve detected you’ve been contacted by scammers” which gets their attention and lends more credence by saying “we”. Instead of giving a long-winded explanation, just say “we’re trying to stop the scammers from stealing [your] money”.<\/p>\n
Once they’ve been alerted to the scam, they’ll have their shield up and will be wary of the scam-baiter, so their trust can be earned by telling them to “just look up [type of] scam on youtube”. That way, they’ll see examples of what they’re doing and be inoculated against the scam once they see the tricks and tactics that were just used on them.<\/p>\n
I can understand the desire to direct them to the scam-baiter’s own channel, but that’s not going to help ameliorate the victim’s suspicions, it’s better to just be generic and let them see ANY examples.<\/p>\n
Here’s a nice, simple, easy-to-remember script to use:<\/p>\n
\r\nHi,\r\n\r\nI'm a fraud-investigator and we've noticed that you were contacted by scammers; we're trying to intercept the interaction before they can steal your money.\r\n\r\n\r\n[explanation as necessary, keeping it as succinct as possible and avoiding technical jargon]\r\n\r\n\r\nYou can see examples of the scam by looking up [tech-support\/tax\/etc.]-scams on YouTube, there are many videos demonstrating the tricks they're trying to use, which you will now recognize.\r\n[avoid promoting your own videos to avoid bias, let them find any videos, they all work]\r\n\r\n\r\n[before concluding the call, after being thanked]\r\n\r\nNo problem, happy to help. Share scam-baiting videos with anyone you think might be susceptible to scams.\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I keep seeing scam-baiters struggle to talk to victims when they intercept a scam. They always struggle with what to call themselves, trying to explain what scam-baiting is. They should just call themselves a “fraud investigator” because it’s literally what they’re doing, and it’s clear and concise (“fraud investigator” isn’t an official title with requisite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}