Scambaiting 101

What is it?

So, you want to start scambaiting? First let’s clear up what scambaiting is. Scambaiting is a form of Internet vigilantism, where the vigilante poses as a potential victim to the scammer in order to waste their time and resources, gather information that will be of use to authorities, and publicly expose the scammer. The most common form of scambaiting is baiting a Tech Support Scammer.

How to bait Tech Support Scammers

Tech support scambaiting is pretty easy, and it costs nothing but time. You will need:

• VMware/Virtualbox (Virtual Machine software)
• A copy of Windows/Linux/macOS (You can get Windows 10 and many distros of Linux for free and legally A download for the Media Creation Tool for Windows 10 ISOs can be found here)
• PC with 8GB of RAM (16GB is recommended)
• 2GB+ of disk space
• VoIP (Voice over IP) service (I use FireRTC)
• Scammer numbers (Scammer Info is a good site to find some)
• Wireshark (Network packet capturing software for scammer IP)*
• Keylogger (BestX is my favorite)*
• Recording software (OBS is free and open source)*

*Optional

Set Up

Your scambaiting setup is easy. Once you have the OS of your choice, Install your preferred virtual machine software and load the OS…