Face it, we live in an era defined by “fake news,” identity theft, and countless nefarious schemes to separate you from your money through false pretenses, especially using social media. Just a few months ago, the feds indicted dozens of scammers working out of India, an operation that targeted 56 individuals and 5 companies, for frauds perpetrated against over 10,000 people that cheated them out of literally hundreds of millions of dollars.
The good news is that the feds occasionally get help from unexpected sources, such as Project Mayhem, which is described as the work of “a security developer who tries to prevent victims from being scammed by different types of scams.”
A group of phone scammers had the misfortune to approach this particular security developer, who goes by the username “YesItWasDataMined,” a move that it quickly came to regret. In this case the scammers were pretending to work for the IRS calling about a “miscalculation error” in past taxes with some scarifying language about attempting to defraud the government—the hackers then proceeded to attempt to secure the “total outstanding amount,” which was purportedly $8,219.
Project Mayhem instantly recognized the scam for what it was, and decided to take action. He wrote a script that dialed each of their phones 28 times per second with an automated message, tying up their lines and making it impossible to reach other potential victims. Crucially, he recorded many of the scammers as they contended with the same impersonal recording endlessly stating the following:
Hello! It has been detected that you are a scammer. Because of this, we are now flooding your phone lines to prevent you from scamming additional people. This will not stop until you stop.
The method worked wonders, as we can hear the increasingly frustrated responses of the scammers, which range from sarcasm (“Hi, it has been detected that you are trying to fuck me up”) to prideful rage (“YES I KNOW I AM A SCAMMER, AND I’M PROUD TO BE A SCAMMER MOTHERFUCKER!”)
More, after the jump…