Can You Trust Anything Online

“I never set out to be an internet personality. I’m just a guy who wants to stop scammers from hurting people.” - Kitboga Share on X

You think you’d never fall for a scam until you meet someone like Kitboga. He’s a software engineer who’s turned his curiosity about online fraud into a full-time mission to outsmart scammers and protect the people they target. His YouTube channel, The Kitboga Show, has millions of followers and nearly a billion views, thanks to his mix of humor, empathy, and clever ways of exposing how scams really work.

In our conversation, Kit opens up about how this all started, what it’s really like to spend hours pretending to be a scam victim, and how organized crime has turned fraud into a massive global business. He shares what’s changed over the years and why those old “red flags” don’t always work anymore and how new tools like deepfakes and AI have made deception harder to spot than ever.

Kit also talks about his newest project, Serif Secure, a free tool he created to help people clean and protect their computers after a scam attempt. He’s honest, thoughtful, and a little funny even when the subject is dark. By the end, you’ll see just how much one person can do to fight back.

“The same scams that fooled people ten years ago are still working today, just dressed up in new technology.” - Kitboga Share on X

Show Notes:

• [01:15] Kit explains how he got into “scam baiting” and why protecting victims became personal.
• [03:05] He shares how streaming scam calls to friends unexpectedly turned into a viral mission.
• [06:07] Kit recounts nearly falling for a Discord impersonation scam himself.
• [09:17] We discuss how deepfakes and AI are changing what a “red flag” looks like online.
• [11:31] Scammers now use real services like PayPal and DocuSign to appear legitimate.
• [13:11] Kit explains how long-term investment and “pig-butchering” scams draw people in slowly.
• [15:51] Fraudsters are now going after 401(k)s and retirement funds instead of small cash grabs.
• [17:00] We examine how fake phone numbers and online ads make verification harder than ever.
• [19:56] Kit talks about the emotional toll of scam-baiting and why he sometimes needs a break.
• [21:51] We reflect on why decades-old scams, like Nigerian letters, still thrive today.
• [23:57] The scale of organized fraud is compared to global industries worth trillions.
• [25:41] Kit admits scams will never truly disappear—only evolve with new technology.
• [26:44] We learn how his team uses automation to detect and map out scam networks.
• [30:24] Kit describes juggling live streaming with scam calls and the role humor plays in coping.
• [33:37] He explains why scammers’ aggression still works and what it reveals about victims.
• [37:00] Kit shares moving stories of victims, including a widower deceived in a romance scam.
• [40:00] We explore how scams erode self-trust and make victims doubt their own judgment.
• [42:13] Kit talks about working with law enforcement and the need for stronger collaboration.
• [44:10] We hear about Serif Secure, his anti-scam software designed to protect users’ devices.
• [47:04] The software now proactively blocks remote access tools and phishing websites.
• [48:14] Kit warns about “scam recovery” frauds and the cruel trick that targets victims twice.
• [49:30] We wrap with practical advice on skepticism, security, and staying a step ahead of scammers.

“Scams don’t just steal money. They steal trust, confidence, and peace of mind” - Kitboga Share on X

Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review. 

Links and Resources:

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• Kitboga – YouTube
• Seraph Secure
• Kitboga
• Kitboga – Instagram
• The Scamcast with Kitboga

Transcript:

Kit, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

I’m excited. Thanks for having me.

This will be a blast. For the one listener who doesn’t know who you are, who are you and what do you do?

I think it’s known as scam baiting. The idea is baiting a scammer to go through their script and make them believe that I’m the perfect target. A lot of fraud investigations, a lot of scam research. I’m a bit famous on the Internet for making scammers really angry.

There’s a meme—“Do Not Redeem”—where I built this fake Google Play store. Of course, the scammers want the gift card. I would start typing the gift card on my fake Google Play store and redeem it. They would be screaming, “Do not redeem,” and getting really angry because they were losing the money.

What got you started in this space?

I’m a software engineer by trade and by heart. I’ve always been into computers and tech. About eight-to-nine years ago, I heard about the tech support scam, the fake virus popup–type scam. My grandma had dementia, grandpa had Alzheimer’s. They had gotten taken advantage of by a bunch of different types of scams.

As soon as I saw that fake virus, I thought, “My grandma would definitely believe this. She has to trust people.” If someone called her on the phone and said, “I’m Microsoft. There’s a virus on your computer,” she would definitely go along.

I don’t know if you’ve had these moments in your life where you just get this spark of passion or, “I’ve got to do something about this.” I started calling the phone numbers because I thought if I spent 10 minutes on the phone, that was 10 minutes they weren’t talking to my grandma or someone’s grandma. I just did that in my free time.

I started calling the phone numbers because I thought if I spent 10 minutes on the phone, that was 10 minutes they weren’t talking to my grandma or someone’s grandma. -Kitboga Share on X

I wouldn’t shut up about it. I talked about it all the time. Some of my friends told me, “Maybe you should stream it so we can watch.” So I started streaming it on Twitch, maybe eight years ago, to a couple of friends. One day, some random viewer showed up there and they shared a clip on Reddit. Then the next thing you know, there were 20 or 30 people watching me, then 200, then 2,000, and then 20,000. It just became my life.

That’s crazy. Something you never planned on doing,

For sure. The name Kitboga has nothing to do with scamming or scam baiting or tech at all.

Did the name predate Twitch in that?

Yeah. I used to play a game called Age of Empires. It’s a video game. There’s a Mongolian warlord named Kitboga. It’s has nothing to do with this world.

I’m going to date myself. I don’t even remember the book. Back in my youth, I ran a BBS out here in Southern California, predating the Internet. I know, I’m ancient. I went by the moniker Lord Barrick, which was a character from, gosh I don’t even remember what the book was, but I went by that moniker for 10 or 15 years. And then moved on, eventually, but we pick up things from our youth that are fun for us.

Yeah, and it sticks with you. You never know what’s going to happen.

I love it. Before we dig in, one of the questions I’d like to ask my guests, particularly those that are in the counter-fraud and counter-scam space, is if you’ve ever been a victim of a fraud or a scam.

The reason why I ask this is because if you and I can’t get it right 100% of the time, our audience shouldn’t feel ashamed or embarrassed if it happens to them. So do you have a story that you can tell?

Yeah, a few. I think when I was younger, back to the video game days, I was a big Runescape fan. For anyone listening that knows Runescape, there are some popular scams where they would tell you, “Oh, if you drop your money on the ground in this specific spot, it’ll double the money” or something. Then of course, I fell for some of those sorts of things early on.

I’d say the most serious one was maybe two years ago. I’ve already had been doing this for quite a few years. I got a message from somebody on Discord, maybe even more than one person. For those that don’t know, Discord is a messaging app like Slack or Teams or something.

They said, “Kit, there’s this Discord channel where someone is impersonating you, and they are really gross. They’re doing adult stuff, trying to trick people into sending nudes or things like that. Of course, I know this is a scammer or something weird’s going on.”

Traditionally, I click all those sketchy links, and I go to all those things because I want to bait the scammers. I’m thinking maybe this will be a YouTube video or something. I’ll go figure out who this person is. So I click the link to join the Discord. Something pops up and says I have to scan this QR code to prove that I’m not a robot and all that. I think, “Eh, whatever. No big deal.” I try to scan it and it didn’t work. It said that I had to log into Discord. Well, that’s weird. Let me try it again. It still didn’t work.

Then I scanned it with a phone emulator that I use for scam baiting. Sure enough, what happened is I was authenticating to Discord through this QR code, and I lost that fake account on my emulator immediately. The only reason I didn’t lose my Kitboga account is because I obfuscate my life. I segment my life, so my personal phone doesn’t have my Kitboga stuff on it on purpose. But I scanned it with my phone. If I would’ve had the Kitboga logged in, I would’ve lost the Kitboga account.

Anyway, it was one of those, I wasn’t quite thinking about it. It was right time, right place, and it can happen to anybody.

That’s something I consistently hear from people that are in the space. It was the right scam at the right time. They were busy or concerned about something. This just made sense that this would be happening.

Didn’t seem that big a deal to prove you’re not a robot. This happens all the time.

That’s awful. To me it’s like, “OK, can we trust anything online?”

I don’t know. Maybe that could be the whole topic of the episode. I think I’ve been trying to preach much more skepticism when it comes to things online, especially with the way AI is advancing. Did you just see that Wan2.2 Animate stuff that came out?

No, I haven’t.

There are some models that are just coming out now every month, it seems like, that are revolutionary deep fake-type tech or ways to mimic things.

Let’s talk about that, because I think this is perfect. Back when I started doing my site in 2000—I’ve been dealing with people that have been scam victims and talking about this for a decade or more. When I started, it was very easy of, “Wel,l just jump on a video call with them. If they won’t jump on a video call, then clearly they’re not real.”

They won’t do a FaceTime, or if the FaceTime is really grainy and blotchy and they say, “Oh I’m at the airport,” “Oh I’m traveling,” “I’m in this exotic foreign land that has no good internet.” That was your signal on the dating app. “Hey, here’s a red flag.” One-hundred percent just walk away at that point. What are some of the red flags that you think were used to be clear and true that are no longer true?

Gosh, I say the same thing because you used to be able to do the same thing with emails where you could tell people look at who’s sending you the email, for example. Make sure that it is coming from the right source. Make sure it’s trustworthy. I think we really hammered that home. There was a lot of education around that.

But now, I don’t know if you’ve seen this or it’s come up much on the show, just today I had multiple submissions from the community where scammers are sending you DocuSign messages that say, “Your account’s been hacked” or whatever. “Call this 1-800 number to speak with customer service.” But it comes from DocuSign, and it looks very legitimate.

Or they do that with PayPal. They send business PayPal invoices to you. In the description, they can type whatever they want. They say, “This is Best Buy. Call our 1-800 number.” That advice doesn’t work anymore because it came from PayPal, and that’s the legitimate PayPal email address. I think there are lots of stuff like that happening right now.

Video calls are a huge one. I used to say the same thing, especially with romance scams. Call them. Talk to them on the phone. I had someone pretending to be Jason Momoa—Aquaman. To my surprise, they started chatting with me on WhatsApp and did a voice call, but they were using a deep fake chat software, and we were having a real-time conversation. They were holding up.

You could tell. I have a trained ear, let’s say, because I’ve done this so much. He was holding his phone up to his laptop, and that’s how he was doing it. But to someone who doesn’t realize it, it sounded like you were talking to Jason Momoa, and this is happening right now.

That’s the unfortunate thing. Now I feel bad about all the advice I’ve given because it’s no longer valid.

Stuff changes. I felt a bit similar in the past too because people would ask Kit. A big one. I don’t know if this resonates for you, but when people would ask for advice, I would often say whether you think that you’re receiving a million dollars or you think you owe a million dollars, urgency is going to be the big key. But with things like the investment scams, pig butchering and stuff, it’s a slow game. The way the scheme works is almost by definition the opposite of that.

You put a little money in, it goes up over time, you believe it’s real. Urgency suddenly goes out the window. You’ve now spent six months “trading” on a platform, even though you were never trading in the first place. So yeah, I felt bad about that advice as well, but I think I’m sure your advice, just like some of mine, still stands in some cases, so I wouldn’t feel too bad.

Be cautious about everything. Advice now still stands. The interesting evolution that I’ve seen—I think I’ve talked about it before—is I had someone contact me about investment scam. I didn’t get the whole background of how it got started, but he put in $10,000 to the fake investment, the fake app, and at some point it was up $40,000 or $50,000.

The scammer was like, “Hey, you’re up $50,000. What you should do is take out $5,000 now. That way if it goes down, you at least have a good chunk of your money.” So they got $5,000 back out. That was the confirmation to them for later on to put their life savings in it, to convince family and friends to dump all of their money in it, because it was like, “Well, it couldn’t be a scam because I got some money back.”

What strikes me as intriguing there, too, is that the scammer prompted it. Now you think that they’re also giving you good advice. “They care about me. They’re giving me good investment advice. They want to make sure that I don’t risk it all and I don’t get any money.”

Of course, the scammers are happy to give you a little bit of money because now they know. And they still haven’t lost anything. They’re still up $5,000 or whatever it was, and they’re betting on you putting your life savings in there, which is becoming really common now, that tactic.

And that’s scary is that they’ve given up on the quick game of how much money can I get out of this person today, versus how much can I string them for over the course of the next three, six, nine, 12 months before we yank all their money?

I think that’s been, maybe, the biggest change that I’ve seen in the past eight years of doing this has been that exact sentiment. It was go buy a $500 gift card when I started, and now that still exists some, but it’s very normal for these scammers to spend months or years manipulating someone, going after their entire life savings.

It’s $500,000. It’s scammers on Telegram and Facebook groups right now selling leads to other scammers, pretending to be Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and like investment. They’re going after your 401(k) now, not the $500 gift card. That’s very scary.

My dad had one of those where he got a call from an investment company. Luckily, it was one that he didn’t do business with. But he was concerned enough about the call to like, “I’m not going to talk to this person. I’m going to hang up and then call back that investment company at a known good number to confirm that someone hasn’t set up an account in his name.”

My dad’s good enough to know, stop, disconnect, and do something that you know is real. But even that is getting a little bit squirrely with, “Oh, what are you going to do? Are you going to go to Google and you’re going to search for the right phone number?”

They’re running an ad.

They’re running an ad with a fake phone number in it. It’s only up for 45 minutes, but it’s 45 minutes where people are calling in on that fake number. This whole thing just gives me the creeps whenever I talk about it.

Maybe this is an inside baseball question. Years ago, when I got those phone calls, I had the same mindset that you did. “Well, let me see if I can waste 10 minutes of this person’s time. It’s 10 minutes of time they’re not going to scam somebody else.” And I stopped because I got alerts on my watch saying, “Your heart rate is through the roof.” My watch is thinking I’m having a heart attack because the whole thing, there’s more drama than I can handle in my life.

Did you get that yourself now? Or is this just also common that it’s just like you’re talking to anybody?

I think that it has changed. Of course, in the beginning it was a lot more learning. I didn’t know exactly what was going on, so every call was a fresh new experience.

I still remember one time a scammer started threatening my family, and I actually got concerned for a minute thinking, “What if I did mess up? What if he does know where I live? What if he is going to come and hurt my family?” Whereas now, I’m not worried about that at all.

I think at a lot of instances, I know the script better than they do. But occasionally there are scams that are new or newer, and I feel much more engaged in that flow state but also nervous at times, wondering what’s going to… Share on X

I think at a lot of instances, I know the script better than they do. But occasionally there are scams that are new or newer, and I feel much more engaged in that flow state but also nervous at times, wondering what’s going to happen.

Lately, I’ve been getting into some situations where the scammers want to get on a Zoom call or I have to look older than I actually am. My heart races a little bit. At one point, I was changing. This is just a video recording, I have a green screen behind me, but this is essentially what I’m looking at right now.

I remember redoing my office, putting a plant, a lampshade and all this stuff, and even trying to make it look like I just live in a house instead of a green wall behind me because I wanted them to believe the Zoom call. Then my heart’s racing.

That makes sense. Whenever there’s something new, you’re like, “Oh, this is exciting. I finally got something that’s new.”

Yeah. I don’t know if this relates or not to where the conversation may go, but I think AI is interesting and certainly going to be a huge part of our lives, especially when it comes to scams. But I look at the Microsoft fake virus popup that I got started on, say, nine years ago. It still exists today.

I got a message from someone today whose family lost thousands of dollars to that exact scam. It has barely changed in nine years. They’re not using AI. Maybe they’re using AI to spin up servers faster or something, but it’s not apparent. They’re not deepfaking anything. They’re not using this cutting-edge, state-of-the-art technology.

I’m happy to talk about AI, but sometimes I think about, “Gosh, these techniques work. This is a decade old, and they’re making billions of dollars off of this scam.” It almost compounds it. You could say, “Well, it’s only going to get worse if they start using AI, and we still haven’t solved the problem.”

I know back pre-internet days, the Nigerian scam was a fax machine scam. They would send the faxes to people in accounting departments, because they were the ones who had access to the money, with this thought that if the person in finance is a little bit compromised or struggling with their finances, they see this message and like, “Well, I’ll take a little bit of the company money, spend it here, I’ll get this huge return, then I’ll give the money back to the company and no one will ever know, and I’ll be out of my financial….” It’s a tried and true scam that’s been around for 30 years and still works today. Even though we joke about it and even has a name, it still gets people.

You know, Chris, today as well, somebody sent me a picture of their parents got a letter in the mail saying that someone with the same last name as them left $10 million to them. I’m thinking, “Gosh, this is decades old, but it’s still alive and well.”

It was a postal letter scam? Like a physical mail or was it an email?

Interestingly, it was essentially a carbon copy of the classical Nigerian print, 419 scam, but they printed it out on letterhead and mailed it to this person. So it seemed a little bit more legitimate.

Of course if it came through the mail; it must be legitimate.

Yeah, they were pretending to be a lawyer and there was all this money in their name. I don’t know how much that particular scam has advanced, but part of this conversation, I think, is how I don’t know if it not industrialized, but there’s this scale that’s happened in the fraud world, in the scam world, where we have these organized criminal organizations—maybe industrialized is the right word—billions and billions of dollars reinvesting into their tech and figuring out ways to scam people.

I was talking to someone a couple of months ago and they said, “Kit, if you take a look at the fraud statistics, the billions that they’re stealing just in the US is enough to put Scam Incorporated in the S&P 500. These are big, big, big, big dollars. It’s hard to wrap your head around it. You just hear a billion dollars, you’re like, “OK, that’s a lot.” But it’s devastating amounts. I think globally last year was a trillion dollars. These are GDPs of nations, right?

Yeah. The scale of it is just baffling, and it’s not just one entity that’s doing it. There are dozens, hundreds, thousands, I don’t know. It’s not just like, “Hey, the Bob Cartel is running this.”

It’s all over the world. The AARP put out a report this year that if I remember correctly, it’s 89% of people that knew they got scammed did not report it to the government or the police. Let’s call it 90%.

It’s an order of magnitude more that we thought it was a $1 trillion problem. It’s really a $10 trillion problem.

It could be $10 trillion. Then I was just talking to a friend and I said, “Well, OK. Those are the people who knew they got scammed and didn’t report it. What about all the people who don’t know they’re being scammed? That $10 trillion problem, what is it?”

To me, it’s the fight of my life. Sometimes people ask me, “Well, Kit, if you’re going after all these scammers, what are you going to do when the scammers are gone?” I don’t know if they will ever go away, but even if I am not making YouTube videos anymore, there’s just so much work to do in the scam and fraud world that I can’t imagine stopping.

I will happily retire on a beach somewhere. That’s what I’m going to do if it goes away. History unfortunately says it’s not going to go away. It’s just going to morph.

A couple of questions, and I think I already know one of the answers to this, because you’ve already little inside baseball. How much of the scams that you interact with are coming from your own devices and own phone numbers, which I assume you’ve got about a thousand phone numbers, and how many are coming from your viewers submitting them to you?

There’s a third category, too, I think. I owe a lot from the community, and I have a team now that helps research. We have almost a scam crawler if you think of how Google crawls the Internet for things we’ve built, different tech that’s constantly crawling for scams. We ingest different feeds that we then look at and see if we can find similarities.

One domain name that’s hosting a fake bank website, you do a reverse DNS and oh look there. They’re hosting 17 more fake banks. We do a lot of that, too, where we expand on the threat and tell that we get. -Kitboga Share on X

Some of the viewers or listeners probably know that where there’s one scam, there are often many more. One domain name that’s hosting a fake bank website, you do a reverse DNS and oh look there. They’re hosting 17 more fake banks. We do a lot of that, too, where we expand on the threat and tell that we get.

So when someone in the community says, “Hey, Kit. My mom almost fell for this scam.” Or, “Hey, Kit, I fell for this investment scam,” we take that little bit of information that we get, and then sometimes it turns into five or six other scams.

So do much come from your own devices?

Yes and no.

Luckily, recently I’ve been getting very few calls, but those ebb and flow.

I personally don’t get a lot of scam calls. My secret is that I use VoIP numbers on my phone. The only people that know the number that was given to me by the phone carrier are my mom, my wife, and my siblings. I don’t ever fill it out anywhere. I don’t use it for anything.

Then I have eight different VoIP numbers that all go to my phone, and I pass this. Again, I go back to this segmentation. My doctor and medical has one number. My bank has a different number. When I go shopping, it has a different number. And I can just ditch these numbers whenever I want if it’s involved in a breach or if I get tons of spam calls.

But what I’ve found with the VoIP numbers is that because they’re old, recycled numbers that probably were once spamming themselves—the scam)—they usually don’t show up on lists and scammers usually don’t want to contact you because it’s already a spam number. Anyway, I don’t know if that works for everybody, but it’s worked well for me.

Now on the Kitboga site, I will say quickly I probably maintain about 50 numbers at any given time. Some of those are on lists. I certainly get texts and calls every day from scammers.

And how often do those numbers get burned in the sense that, once a scammer realizes, and I assume every now and then someone goes, “Oh, I know exactly who I’m talking to and OK, goodbye. Thanks, Kit. Have a nice day.” Once the number has been burned, does it seem to get burned everywhere?

Not too often because I don’t think a lot of the call centers are sharing information between each other, like that’s every man for themselves. I don’t think they’re in this group chat saying, “Oh, here’s Kitboga’s phone number.” Sometimes, I have to get a new number, but honestly it’s because I leave the phone number during a live stream and then everyone watching the live stream wants to call it.

I think you usually, if I remember right, you put your hand in front of your mouth, but occasionally, “Whoops, we got a digit or two.”

Is it hard to maintain personas, like I’m live streaming, so I have to interact with my audience, in a sense? Then I’m dealing with a scammer and that, what are they, context shifting?

I’ve just had practice now. It’s been eight years. I think it’s almost second nature where I can bounce between, and like muscle memory just pressing certain buttons. But yeah, I think the hardest is when—and I don’t know if this is exactly where you were going, but there are times where I’m in character pretending to be an older gentleman or something, and the scammer’s threatening me and screaming.

I knew everyone watching and myself, it’s almost this inside joke. It’s almost funny because the scammer thinks that I am the perfect target and I’m doing something ridiculous. Instead of going to the bank, my car broke down and I’m trying to fix a flat tire or whatever it is, some ridiculous scenario.

The hard part is every once in a while I just get hit with this moment where like, it’s funny, but then you go, the scammer thinks this is real. They’re screaming and basically torturing who they think is just an average everyday person. They don’t think it’s me.

Sometimes that’s the hardest shift is finding the humor and making this light, because I found one of the best ways to educate people is to provide some humor to it. But there are days where I end the stream and I just take my dog for a walk or something and get my head straight before I go see the kids because there’s some dark stuff out there.

But there are days where I end the stream and I just take my dog for a walk or something and get my head straight before I go see the kids because there’s some dark stuff out there. -Kitboga Share on X

I can imagine. You know it’s not real, but the emotional taxing of that awareness of this is how this person is treating another human being. It’s got to be akin to law enforcement and seeing people on the worst days of their lives in a sense.

Yeah. Still there’s a bright spot because while they’re doing it to me, on the flip side, there is this joy almost when they’re getting mad because I’m thinking, “OK, well they don’t know.” They’re putting up with this nonsense. It’s almost cathartic in some ways.

I would say that’s just been the trickiest part of my job is it’s this two-edged sword of yeah, we’ve made them really angry. Like the do-not-redeem stuff, they’re just screaming because they think they’re losing money and it’s like, “Ah, yes. They’ve gotten a little bit of what they deserve.” But then you’re just like, “Gosh, this is what these guys do all day long.”

That’s the disturbing thing. It must work, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it. Them screaming, yelling, and cussing grandma out must actually yield results.

Yeah. I will say, though, I have noticed that they do it a lot less now than they used to. I don’t know if it has anything to do with scam baiting getting more popular and they don’t want to show up on a YouTube video or if it’s just they realized, “OK, we really can’t start screaming because people hang up.”

How often do you end up speaking with victims of scams?

I wouldn’t say every week, but almost every week, I guess. It just depends. Personally, it’s different because I have a team now. I have a lot of people that are behind me. I’d say someone in Kitboga, Incorporated—gosh, a few times a week if not every day is interacting with a victim.

Then we work with a lot of law enforcement or different victim advocacy groups that will help us. I would say myself, a handful of times a month, I’m personally on the phone talking to somebody. Usually, they’re a bit more intricate cases or we got caught up in something.

For example, we have this fake Bitcoin exchange that we pretend to give scammers money. They have to log into this website to try to get their Bitcoin. Occasionally, they get so frustrated that they’ll just ask some other victim to try to log in, call this phone number, and get the Bitcoin.

I’ll just answer the phone because I’m expecting it to be a scammer, but then it’s someone who has no idea what’s going on and they’re actually a victim. So right there in the moment I’m able to walk through what’s going on.

Are they receptive to the idea that they’re a victim? Or they usually think, “Oh, no, no. You’re the scammer. You’re trying to victimize me. The other person is the real person.”

Sometimes I run into that where they think that I’m a scammer, especially if we know a scam is going on, you overhear a phone number or something, and you start calling them. The hardest by far are romance scams because they take a lot of time, then there’s love and psychology involved, where the person truly believes they’re talking to Brad Pitt.

The hardest by far are romance scams because they take a lot of time, then there’s love and psychology involved, where the person truly believes they’re talking to Brad Pitt. -Kitboga Share on X

I had this one gentleman—I’ll keep the story quick—his wife had Parkinson’s and he was taking care of her. Just an awful disease. Over the course of two or three years, they became friends with who they both thought was Emma Watson on Facebook. They were big fans of, I think, her work. They became pen pals and they would talk a few times a week.

As his wife was dying, she said, “I give you permission to pursue whatever happens with Emma. You guys are close. I don’t want you to be alone.” This scammer waited two or three years to ever ask for money. So waited until his wife passed away to start asking for money. He thought it was real. It’s so hard to explain that to somebody, two or three years of your life. Thankfully, we were able to get law enforcement and some special help for him. But those are the worst ones.

The people that I’ve talked to, interviewing on the show and whatnot, have always talked about the hardest aspect for them in moving forward is not that I don’t trust other people, but I don’t trust myself to be able to evaluate other people. It’s not like I think everybody’s out to get me, therefore I’m going to be paranoid. It’s I don’t trust my ability to identify who’s good and who’s bad, and constantly in this state of, I don’t know versus… It’s at least like people can manage the, everybody is bad. I’m going to stay away from everybody. But that I can’t trust myself is the harder position.

Yeah, and when you’re trying to work with people or do some business collaboration and you’re wondering, “Well what’s really going on here,” always looking over your shoulder. Sure. I get that way a bit with stuff, especially in my personal life, where you get the emails or the phone calls.

Or like the other day, we had to replace one of our credit cards because we had lost it. I got a call from my credit card company because they’re like, “Did you actually report your credit card stolen?” I was trying my best not to be mean on the phone, but I was like, “Why are you calling me? Who are you? How did you get my number?”

I was really abrasive because I’m immediately thinking, “You shouldn’t be calling me right now.” It actually was my credit card company. Of course, I called them back and all this stuff. I did all the check boxes.

That’s tough. Have you had much success in working with law enforcement in feeding them? Or banks and saying, “Hey, I know this bank account is being used for fraud.” “Hey, someone’s mailing money to this physical address.” Have law enforcement gotten to the point where they’re receptive to tips, so to speak, from you?

Lots of success in the bank fraud world. We’re actually expanding that to where we’ve created a bunch of AI bots that are talking to scammers all day long. We’re gathering hundreds and hundreds of accounts each month at this point. We’ll probably get to the point where we’re gathering thousands of accounts that then we can pass on to law enforcement and fraud departments and work with their fraud team.

That’s been really great over the years, especially when it was smaller scale. It was easier to just, like I have email addresses for people at certain banks and certain law enforcement agencies. The hardest part is with law enforcement; they’re just overwhelmed with scams. The tricky one is, gosh, someone losing $50,000 or a scammer that isn’t moving millions of dollars just becomes not as interesting for most three-letter agencies because there’s so much going on. That’s hard.

And that’s the sign there are bigger fish to fry than the someone who lost $100,000.

Which is crazy because it’s life-changing, devastating. I don’t know exactly what the answer is. Whatever it is, I hope that I have the opportunity to be a part of it. I think that in some ways there just has to be more public-private partnerships.

I know in Australia and different countries, they’re starting to form—I think Canada has an anti-scam center now. Australia has. I know it’s not just the government’s going to solve everything, but I would love to see some more support from the government. I don’t really see a lot of grants coming out right now, for example.

Maybe we’ll talk about it later, but I’ve been building some software and doing different things to help people in the scam world. There is no grant out there, at least that I know of, that will help do things like that. Imagine someone right now wants to build some tech to fight back against scams. It’s all private equity. It all has to be self-funded. I hope that some of that improves in the future.

The unfortunate thing is, for someone to build this stuff, the private equity almost has to be philanthropy, because no one’s going to go, “Hey I’m going to make $100 million a year fighting scams.” There are niches where, sure you’ve got a YouTube channel. There are things like that that can, but that’s not scalable to the government. The US government is not going to start up their own YouTube channel doing scam baiting.

No. I think there’s also this other, other problem with, because it’s so much data and because there’s so much going on, who do you talk to? Especially in the government because they’re all so busy. I would certainly love to see them step up their game and provide more support for people.

A buddy of mine likens it onto the war on drugs. We suddenly realized, this is a really big deal and we’ve got to make the DEA, we’ve got to, what was it? D.A.R.E. and Scruff McGruff and I don’t know all the different stuff that started. It became a big thing, and still is a big thing.

I think we need to get to the point where we’re saying there’s this war with scams. It’s a state of emergency on scams kind of a thing because it poses a really, really big threat, I think, to everybody. -Kitboga Share on X

I think we need to get to the point where we’re saying there’s this war with scams. It’s a state of emergency on scams kind of a thing because it poses a really, really big threat, I think, to everybody.

You alluded to it, and you talked about being a software developer. You have developed some software in this space. Tell me about it.

The idea came to us because a friend of a friend basically fell for this tech support scam, the one I got started with and we’ve been talking about. They went to the bank to wire $30,000 or $40,000. Thankfully, the bank teller asked the right questions and stopped this.

Amazing. I think bank tellers are probably underrated in the fraud space and some unsung heroes. If they have the right education, I think they could be preventing tons and tons of scam.

Anyway, they call my friend. Frantically, they’re crying, they’re panicked. I don’t know what happened. I fell for this scam. My friend calls me, we’re on this conference call, and she’s crying. What do I do?

We’re trying to walk her through how to clean her computer because, you probably know this, but the scammers love to get on people’s computers and personal devices because then they can control your whole life. They can see your webcam, your emails, all this stuff. They can control your bank account.

I’m trying to explain to this older individual who’s not tech savvy how to clean their computer. They don’t even want to touch the computer because they’re terrified of what just happened. They still think that they got hacked. You and I know that it was tech support scammers.

Anyway, we’re like, “Ugh. Gosh, what do we do? What do we do for this person? Just tell them to go to Best Buy?” We know that in a lot of cases, that doesn’t fix the problem, either. We said, “What if we built some software to clean up people’s computers, and to remove all the remote connections after someone’s been scammed?”

We worked on that. It’s free. It’s called Seraph Secure.We liken it to, if you’ve got your house broken into, the police show up and they clear your house. They make sure that there’s no one in there anymore. This is a tool to clean up your computer.

Then while we were building it, we said, “Well, we wouldn’t have to do it just reactively. We could do it proactively as well.” Now, we added some new features where if you have it installed, it won’t let those remote connections happen in the first place. It blocks thousands of websites, stuff like that.

I’ve been doing this eight-to-nine years. I just don’t want my mom to ever run into the scammers that I run into. And I think part of what we’ve been talking about is how quickly it’s changing and how devastating it can be. I think basically anti-scam software is going to become a big deal, whether it’s the software that I’m working on or other companies are working on or starting to work on.

I think we’re at that point right now where we need anti-scam software, and eventually it’ll become a household thing. -Kitboga Share on X

It’s like anti-viruses when they first came out. There was anti-spyware, anti-rootkit, anti-malware, anti-this, anti-that, and that was all new. Then it basically became a household name, like everyone just has some. Then Windows Defender came out. I think we’re at that point right now where we need anti-scam software, and eventually it’ll become a household thing.

I like it. I think that’s super helpful. As we wrap up, I’ll ask this question. The normal questions would be, what’s the advice that you’d give people? And you’re going to repeat the same eight things that everybody else repeats, or five, or whatever. What’s the advice that people aren’t getting that they need to hear? And then maybe you can tie it in with scam recovery.

Oh, wow. That is becoming a really big problem. Let’s start with scam recovery. I try not to use the word hate too much, but I loathe the scam recovery stuff. For those unaware, it’s essentially the scam after the scam.

Let’s start with scam recovery. I try not to use the word hate too much, but I loathe the scam recovery stuff. For those unaware, it’s essentially the scam after the scam. -Kitboga Share on X

We’re dealing with this big crypto Ponzi scheme right now that we’ve been working on getting shut down for months, and it’s finally collapsing and falling apart. But now, all of the victims are being contacted by the same scammers saying, “Hey, we found out that you got involved in this scam and we’re here to help you recover your money.” Some of them are believing it, and it’s so hard for us to tell them.

In their mind they’re like, “I just lost $50,000. If I have to go get a loan or talk to a friend to pay another thousand to potentially get my $50,000 back, it’s worth it.” But it’s not. It’s not true. It’s not real. You can almost never get this money back.

A lot of people aren’t talking about that. You’re right that a lot of the advice I would give or a lot of people say a lot of the same things. I think skepticism is certainly still really important.

The other, I guess I would jump to things like AI. We are in the time right now where people can deep fake and clone your voice in five seconds. You can get phone calls and be on Zoom call. I didn’t even bother to figure out, am I really talking to you right now, but we are 100% in that time period right now. We’ve been talking about it for months or years, but at this point, it is entirely possible for most of this conversation to have been faked.

Now, I don’t think maybe the average person needs to worry about that just yet, but it’s next.

It’s on the horizon.

Yeah, it could happen. It is happening to CEOs, CFOs, and stuff.

Then lastly, of course, it’s a tie-in to why we built the software, but we’re just trying to shout from the rooftop, so to speak, about remote connections, because I think a lot of people don’t realize how devastating they are. Once a scammer is on your device, especially your desktop, they can connect at any time.

Even if you realize that it’s a scam, we have case after case where someone’s filling out an IC3.gov report, and the scammer’s watching. Then they call back from your local police department phone number. They see the IC3.gov information and they just scam you again.

Right now on ftc.gov and a lot of bank websites, FBI websites, they don’t tell you to remove the remote connections from your computer. We’ve been trying to convince them to update their websites. That’s part of why we built Seraph Secure so people could remove these connections. But to me, that’s just one of those things that needs to be talked about over and over and over and over again.

Whether or not you want to use our software is fine, but you have to clean your computer. If you think you load a scammer on your computer, you have to get them off because they’ll just continue to re-victimize people. I think in the bank fraud world, that’s part of the account takeover, and that type of stuff is happening.

Seraph Secure is seraphsecure.com?

Yeah.

That’s easy. Why would you make it simple? You have to use the funny little a and the e with the… no.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, imagine. Funny. We had so many different names we wanted to use, and every domain name’s been registered at this point.

And it gets churned every two minutes.

Yes, oh my gosh.

If people want to find you online, where’s the best place to find your content?

I’m partial to the YouTube channel. Just type in Kitboga. I think it’s @kitbogashow, technically, on YouTube, or kitboga.com has links to everything. That’s maybe, that’s the easiest thing, kitboga.com, and they’ll have the link to everything you need.

And we’ll make sure to link to it in the show notes, Seraph Secure. We’ll link to kitboga.com. We’ll link to the YouTube channel. Not that people can’t find those things, but we appreciate you being on the podcast and coming here today.