So You Want To Be A Baiter?

Okay, so silly disclaimer. Um, when I originally did this, I had one where I pretended to shoot my wife. Um, and I did have a genuine disclaimer on that one. This one's just, you know, for fun. So then, so you want to be a beta. Uh, my name is Wayne May and for the past 20 years, I've been a scam baiter and a part of the anti-cam community. Um, in 2012 I set up scams survivors.com and have been running it ever since. To begin with, what is a scam baiter? How many of you know what a scam beta is? Couple of you. Oh, quite a few. Basically, when you receive an email from a scammer, most people delete it or

reply back tell them to go uh tell them to go forth and multiply. What a scam bait will do is write back to them saying, "Oh, really? Can you tell me more? And there are straight baiters who will gather up the information that the scammer has, post it up online, and try to find out as much as they can about that scammer. And there there are trophy baiters, which is something that I would do where we would get a scammer to do or say something really ridiculous. And you will hear examples of that in a little bit. So begin with, if you take nothing else away from this talk, always bait safe. Like I say, this is the most important

part of this. Firstly, when you start baiting, never use anything that could be traced back to your real life details. Start off with a new email account. If you want social media, create a new social media and find photos somewhere. You could use AI ones. Just nothing that could ever lead back to you. Keep records when you start as well. As you go along, you'll find that you'll develop characters and you can slip into those characters quite easily. But to start with, you may find that it's easier to write everything down. So, if you're talking to a scammer in real time, you can just look at your cheat sheet and not slip up and say

anything you shouldn't. And if you do slip up, kill the bait. Don't try to recover it. Don't try to say, "Oh, no, I didn't mean that." Drop it. you can always rebate them further down the line under a new account. So, you haven't lost anything really and you've learned a little bit of uh how the scammer works. So, you can use that experience further on. Now, we go on to the dos and the don'ts. First of all, do bait for the right reasons. Do not bait because you think you're going to become rich and famous because I am living proof that you want. And do not bait because the scammer is from a different country to

you or is uh a different skill color to you. We do not allow, condone, accept racism in any way, shape or form if you are found to be that kind of a person. You will be very quickly found out and you will be very quickly kicked out. Work with other baiters to share knowledge. Now, there are a lot of younger people out there at the moment who'd like to give this a go. They may know stuff that I don't. I've got all these years of experience, so I may know stuff that they don't. For example, I could say you could do that, but try it this way instead. If you work together, you can build everybody up and we become

a better, more formidable team against the scammers. Post what you receive. It's all very well just saying, "Yes, I'm going to mess with a scammer for a little bit." you're not really doing much damage to them. Post what you get. Post it up on sites. And I will keep on plugging my site scams survivors.com. Post this up because the scammers use scripts and those scripts then can be easily found. Try out different scammer types to see what fits. I specialize in romance scamming for sorry, romance scammers, I should say. No, I've never I've never scammed and I've definitely never scammed a scammer. I hate that term. Uh I started off just doing normal 49s and within about a year

discovered that calling up and speaking to romance scammers was my thing. And I also found out that actually speaking to scammers over the phone was definitely my thing. And let your imagination run wild. The only thing that's going to stop you is what you can think of. I have been a part of NASA. I have been Joe Walsh's tour manager. And if you know who Joe Walsh is and I have also been the father of a talking hamster. So there whatever you can come up with just use it. Turn off that brain to mouth filter and go with it. So now the don'ts. First of all don't give them anything they can reuse. And this

includes information. You might think, well, if I send them a silly ID, that's great. It's not. What will happen is if they fall for it, they could reuse that and somebody who doesn't know who Mr. Bean is, will think that it's a genuine ID. Don't educate them. Don't, if they make a mistake, say, "Oh, no, that's wrong." In fact, do the opposite. What you want to do is give them misinformation. I'm going to say a phrase right now and this will show how many people here know any kind of Welsh absolute silence. Perfect. What this means it has no literal translation. If you step in some dogma, you go a or if a child is about to pick

something up off the floor, don't touch that. It's now I taught a Russian scammer that Akavi is Welsh for across the water. and you will see the results of that in a little bit as well. Don't involve other people without their knowledge or permission. This is known as the innocent third party rule. Just because your neighbor walk you up at 7 in the morning mowing his lawn doesn't mean he should give out his phone number or say that's where you live. Only ever involve baiters who want to be involved in the bait. Don't get a scammer to send you money or goods. Uh, this used to be quite popular, but people very quickly realize that the scammer isn't sending

that. It's actually another victim that they persuaded to send it. And once they realize that they've been scammed, it's your details. They have, not the scammers. So, you could end up actually getting arrested. Don't destroy anything the scammer didn't pay for. This is a pet peeve of mine. People like to kill Gmail accounts or Yahoo accounts. Don't. If it's free, let it be. If they paid for it, say for example, they've paid for a fake website, by all means kill it. And we do that. We work with the authorities. We work with the um the people who uh run the sites and we get these uh all killed uh very quickly. We have a very good track record on that.

So again, if it's free, don't touch it. And don't do anything illegal. And that definitely includes hacking. We've all seen YouTube videos. So, yeah, I hacked their call center. Please don't do it. First of all, you are possibly damaging information that law enforcement could use. It's illegal. Plus, if you do it and somebody sees you doing it, they may try to give it a go. And I've actually ended up being sent a virus because somebody sent a scammer virus. It then went to everybody in his inbox and then it went to everybody in all their inboxes and because I was helping somebody who was a victim of the scammer, I ended up receiving it too. So, it's not worth the

risk if you want to hack hack their minds. Honestly, it's much more fun. Now, what tools do you need? That's all you need. An internet connected device and a new email account or two. That's it. It's basically a Phillips screwdriver for building a computer. What's nice to have is a way for the scammers to call you. We used to use Skype for this, but as you probably know, Skype is shutting down next month, and we haven't found a suitable replacement yet. So, what I will say, dig out your old phone, buy one of those uh SIMs that you can pick up in the supermarkets, pay cash, no paper trail, and you can give them that number. A VPN

is nice. But again, if you're using things like Gmail, that hides your IP address anyway, so you're not having to pay for a VPN and they still can't find where you are. And a sandbox is also nice and probably the most useful of the three. But whenever a scammer sends me an image or tells me I need to go to a website, I go, "Yeah, I did it." I never click on it. They they don't know any different. So I' I've never needed a sandbox. And what's not needed is a fancy setup. I have baited on£10 computers. I bait it on fancy computers. The computer itself is unimportant so long as you can go on the internet and

you can send those emails. If you do however want to call the scammers, I will say do not cheap out on your headset. There's nothing worse than trying to call a scammer on a bad line when your headset is all muffled. Anyway, so that is the only thing I would say not to cheap out on. Now, where do you get these email addresses from? I could say a whole bunch of ideas, but I would give you the most simple one, and that is to go to a website that posts up scammers. As you can see, this is my site, and when you look at it, we have a whole bunch of email addresses there. You can also see

that some have got more pages because people have been writing to them and we have been right uh filling in then the information in the following emails. So go there pick an email you want it look like this. All you need to do is put the reply to address then write re what is it on this one? Urgent attention please copy the email and just above it then say oh absolutely brilliant. Uh, can you tell me more? The scammer doesn't know that you never actually received that email. And you can do a whole bunch of these very simply. You know that they're all 100% scammer emails. As I said, I concentrated on romance scammers. So, I'll talk to you a

little bit about how to find them. First of all, find a free dating site known to be full of scammers. Again, go on the site. You'll find that we list quite a lot of them. I'm not going to name any today because they come and go. So, go there. Once you find a couple of uh websites, choose your trap type and then create your profile. There are three trap types that we use. There's the honey trap. Good looking picture, really nice text in it. The problem is you will get a whole bunch of genuine people writing to you. You could do the neutral trap, no image, and hi, I'm new here. Why not say hello?

You'll still get some people who will write to you. Um, but you're not going to get as many. Or my favorite is the vinegar trap. And the best one I ever had, uh, for example, would say the end of an ideal date for me would be us sipping a glass of acid was watching the sunset over the sewage works. And I had, I am not kidding, dozens of messages every single day saying, "Oh, your profile sounds brilliant. I'd love to speak to you more." Now, you click on the obvious GMA profiles to start until you learn how to spot them better. These are ones when you look at the image and it's um a movie star or um an adult entertainer,

which are very popular with the scammers. Click on the ones that you see, but don't write to them. Just click on them. They'll see that you've looked at their profile and you should find that sometimes within minutes they are going to start writing to you. Expect them to take you away from the site as quickly as they can because this is going to stop any competition from other scammers trying to talk to you. Plus, when that profile does get shut down, you're already off that site. So, you don't know it's been shut down because you're a scammer. And fight the yick factor. Oh. when I started. The thing you need to remember with these is that the people that

you're talking to and pretending to fall in love with aren't the person you're speaking to. And quite often they're not even the same gender. And it can be disgusting and really uncomfortable. But what I do, I use that knowing that this lovely female that I'm talking to is actually a guy. and I will be as gross as I can to them because if I feel uncomfortable, they're going to feel 10 times as uncomfortable. So, we've sent off our emails. We've got the scammer's interest on the dating site. What do we do now? First of all, be patient. Don't jump straight in and say, "Yes, I'd love to work with you, but you need to send me a

video of you with a mackerel in one hand, an anchor in the other hand whilst you sing the macarina." they will just go, "Nope." and never reply to you. Build up to it. It may take a couple of emails. It may take a couple of weeks, but you want them to invest as much in you as possible before starting to do these things because then they're less likely to want to walk away. Keep your replies generic so you can reuse them. All you really want to do is say, "I'm interested. Tell me more." You give an affirmation and a request for more information. Write it a bit longer and you can send that out to a dozen, two

dozen scammers every day. The exact same email and play dumb. The scammers are going to try to see if you're genuine or if you know that they're a scammer. So, they might try to sneak something in just to see how you react. Ignore it. Don't say, "What does this mean?" or say, "I know what that means." Just don't mention it. Make them try to appease you when you argue. And you will argue because they are trying to get you to send money and you're not sending money. So the arguments will come. My advice on this is don't turn around and say you're an idiot. Turn around and say, "Why are you talking to me like you think I'm an

idiot?" It's a completely different way of saying the same thing, but they are now on the back foot and having to try to make it up to you. When you get them to apologize, to apologize that first time, it's so much easier to get them apologize further down the line for much bigger things. And many lads make light work. If you're only sending out one email a day, you may have to wait two or three days for them to reply. Send them off to a dozen, two dozen. You're going to get the emails coming in. Some won't reply, some will get dropped off. But when you stay a week or so into it, do another lot and

it'll be like waves constantly. You're never short of a scammer to write to. Now, lad calling. This is when we actually call them up and mess with them. So, where do we get these phone numbers from? They're in their emails. You can see on this one they say, "Reply to me, you know, for me up at this number." So, we get that and then we will phone them up. Again, this is on our site, easy to find. When you do it, let the spotlight be on the scammer. You want to be like an interviewer. You're in every call. Nobody wants to listen to you. They want to see the funny or the stupid things that these scammers are saying. So, let

them be the star. Listen and be ready to go off in a different direction. Sometimes people will say, "Okay, I'm going to do this call and I'm going to do this." But then the scammer may say something and you can jump off in a completely different much funnier direction. Uh for quick example, I was trying to buy a cat off a scammer and at one point he mentioned he was selling them because he was trying to raise money for his daughter's wedding. So invited myself to his daughter's wedding and I offered to buy some very very nice um marital aids and I would bring them along to the wedding and I pushed and pushed and and so the scammer was not

expecting this. He didn't know what to say. So we got him completely off script by listening to something that he said. Again, get him off his script. The scammer will say to you, "Did you send me an email?" and he go, "Yeah, I sent you an email." He didn't. He just said, "Yeah, I sent, but while you're on the phone," and then he may say, you know, "Well, call me back. Call me back." He said, "Well, I'm speaking to you now. So, just agree to what they're saying and then ignore it and carry on pushing what you want to do." Having a fellow bait with you can make for a better call. Uh, some of you

may have seen me on TV doing baits. Uh, we were on we were on scam interceptors. for example, and I usually bait with a lady called the lovely Jill. We are able to bounce ideas off each other. Uh if I need to take a break, she will come in. We can cause friction by my character saying, "Yes, I want to work with you, but you need to persuade my wife and the wife is dead against it." And they it makes it a lot easier. So try baiting. Say two people, maybe a couple of people in a chat as well throwing ideas at you. Ramp up the crazy slowly. Like I said with the emails, don't immediately

jump in going, "Ooh, this stupid thing." Build up to it. And it may only take a couple of minutes. Uh you'll hear with the uh the calls I'm going to play at the end. It started getting really silly about five minutes in that and that's all it takes. and expect duds. The bas never show you this. They may call up 10 scammers and only one gives them a good call. That's normal. Don't worry about that at all. You will build up to it. You will find really funny calls. Sometimes you may get really lucky and have three funny calls in one day. So, expect them. It's all part and parcel what we're doing. So, what to take away from this

call? So, we have bait safely, bait ethically, don't jump straight into the crazy, report all the information you receive, and have fun with it. So, I'm going to show you some of the trophy pictures and some calls in a little bit to show what I have done. So, we start off, and this is probably the one that I'm most well known for, Panty Claws. If you notice, there's a book out there called The Stupid of the Scams. This is where the cover of it came from. This was a Russian scammer. My thing was getting scammers to put underwear on their head. And it was Christmas. So, okay, we'll do panty clothes. Remember I said about teaching

them that a meant across the water. I have a sign that says a although she spelled it wrong. This and the next one are actual handwritten letters and printed photographs that I received through anonymous dropboxes. If you want to see these, I have them in my little laptop bag. You can have a look at them. You'll notice uh the text on these has a very uh specific font. If you look at the next one, you'll notice it's the exact same handwritten letter just with a different female. These are more handwritten letters this time by a West African scammer who I persuaded to create another three personas in his scam. And then I made them all write me a letter. So one, two,

and if you look closely at it, particularly if you look at the top left hand side, the D in background is kind of swirly. If you look at these next ones, do you see that D again? I made the scammer write four different letters by introducing more characters. I'm going to give you some examples of scammer calls. Uh, I pretended to be Joe Walsh's tour manager, as I said, and I'm going to put the lyrics to this song up because if I don't put them up, you won't believe that's what she's singing. [Music] Gucci to the grandma lot of [ __ ] for

funny watching che Oh yeah. That's a genuine song. Honestly, it's a genuine song. Uh these last two that I'm going to do for you now is Houdini the talking hamster. We had mistakenly thought that uh the Reverend John Paul John was the late Pope John Paul and we had him pray for the safe return of our talk in hamster called Houdini. And at this point that we're going to come in, Houdini has just walked into the house and I was at Jill's house at the time and her dog started barking at something out in the garden. So again, off in a completely different direction, this is what we did. Oh no, get that dog away from me. Get

him away. Get away. Daddy. Daddy. He's got me. He's holding my arm. Get the off of me. Hello, madam. Yes, we here we just cut just me. Help. Oh my god, my finger. One of my fingers are gone. [Music]

This happened. Then we had the pope to say a prayer for Houdini so that he would get better. And if you want to contact me while this is playing, uh, there's the information for you. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh my. Oh my god. I'm very, very sorry. I'm very, very, very sorry. Holy Father, say a prayer. I pray in the name of Jesus that she will not die. May the peace of the Lord be with her right now forever and ever. Pray grandma's in the white light. Should I go there? Mommy, don't go towards the white light. I pray in the name of Jesus that nothing will happen to her. And as you heard, Houdini is still alive

and well. How much time do we have? Uh, six minutes. Six minutes. Wow. Okay. So, thank you for listening. Um, because we have six minutes if anybody has any questions. Absolutely no one. Isn't that wonderful? Yes, there is one. There is. You're not getting away that easily. Oh, sorry. Hide in the corner. I guess I'm just curious how you handle the situation where a lot of the scammers you're dealing with are victims of victims themselves of the scamming gangs that they're kidnapped victims that are working under juress on multiple calls simultaneously and they're in trouble for not achieving their goals and targets. I get what you're saying there. uh we tend to target uh you're you're thinking

more the uh the call center types. We don't deal with those ones. These are the 419 scammers, the ones who send you out the emails. So we we understand that those scammers are out there, but they're not the ones that we deal with. U partly because of what you're saying. It's a complex. Yes, it is. um you have to be so careful with things, for example like um money ms. You can't go accusing people of being a scammer because they've been tricked into sending money or receiving money and sending it on. So, there always has to be that balance and that understanding that there are sometimes extenduating circumstances. Yes. Fantastic. Now, we've got the ball

rolling. All the questions are coming in. And that is a mighty fine beard. Well done. How do you Well, to two questions, I suppose. What is the most satisfying conclusion you've had to one of these interludes? The most satisfying conclusion. The most satisfying and the kind of a follow- on question to it is how do you know when it's unwinable when it's just sapping your time away? Uh, I'll answer the second one first. Just sometimes scammers will go into repeat mode and you no matter what you do there, send the money, send the money, send the money, send the money. Uh the Okay. Um can I tell this story? Actually, I better not cuz it Okay, I will. Right. But but

understand this is adult. Okay. The most satisfying conclusion to one we ever had was a um a Nigerian romance scammer called Scoot. And I was writing to him, but we had a female who would go on uh an online radio show at the time that I was working with and call him up and we played him along for ages. I would be drunk talking to him. I would do all kinds of things. But we the romance betas had a thing where we would come up with uh ideas. We had like competitions between ourselves and this one had to involve fruit. Oh, sorry. He walked in at a really bad moment. We took the call and I said to

the person who was planning to be me, ask him if he has a banana. And she said, "Yeah, you know where this is going." She said, "Do you have a banana?" "Uh, do you want me to put it up my ass or what?" I said, "Um, yes." I had set this up. I had convinced him to agree to it. But then because he'd done that, that was as far as we could push him. That was like Black Mirror levels. Uh, he pretended to actually do it. And then we outdid him and told him that he was on the radio and we just recorded him pretending to do this thing. Um but but as I say it's

we don't usually go that far. We usually don't tell them that they've been baited and just let them give up hope that they're going to get money from us. Well, that was certainly an unexpected story post lunch. Um, I know. Thank you very much for that. And I apologize. I I I No, perfect. It's perfect. Perfect. Right.