The Scammer Payback subreddit is the community for the audience and fans of the American YouTuber and streamer Pierogi. The YouTube channel has 7.89M subscribers and features the creator baiting phone and online scams.
Pierogi is a former cybersecurity professional who was inspired to start his career on YouTube and Twitch after watching YouTube videos. At first, his channel featured videos of him prank calling scammers to waste their time. But, as time went by, the project grew into something more serious.
In 2022, Pierogi and his team set up a "People's Call Center," the opposite of a scam call center. The team called internet scammers for a week, pretending to be victims and wasting their time, preventing other people from getting scammed.
As the creator told FOX 7, he would usually do this by himself. "It was kind of good versus evil, the anti-scam call center versus the scam call center," Pierogi explained. "There's going to be evil in this world. And... I think that for every kind of evil thing that's going on, there's a positive as well."
#7 The Person Who Let A Scammer Know They Might Want To Double-Check Their Scams
Pierogi isn't just some Internet vigilante; he's not against working with the government. Recently, as he's told TIME, he started feeding federal authorities information about scam rings. "All different sorts of agencies have knocked on my door," he said.
The creator also draws attention to the fact that it can be hard to put scammers behind bars. When people seek justice, often authorities of multiple countries have to be involved. Also, you'd need victims who would be willing to testify, which doesn't happen often. "We're making it harder for the scammers, but they're also getting smarter," Pierogi told TIME. "It's this cat-and-mouse game."
What is it exactly that scambaiters like Pierogi do? Aside from wasting their time and holding up the phone lines, scambaiters also expose their personal information or even target them with cyberattacks. Another popular streamer and scambaiter Kitboga told NPR how he's sometimes able to get bank account details, cryptocurrency wallet addresses, and other info out of scammers.
Scambaiters usually assume some other persona when talking to scammers. For Kitboga, one of their names is an elderly woman, Edna, inspired by his grandmother. One of the reasons the streamer began scambaiting on his channel was because his grandmother fell victim to fraudsters: he found out she was paying for multiple internet and cable packages.
