Endless Thread - Scamming the Scammers

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Border Patrol is calling: A drug cartel has your bank information, so you need to transfer all your money to a safe Bitcoin account—right now! Millions of people will be familiar with calls like this, in which scammers, often in other countries, use threats or promises to rob you. In 2023, individuals and businesses lost an estimated $485 billion to fraud schemes, according to Nasdaq's Global Financial Crime Report. Law enforcement will only do so much to recover losses. That is why some online streamers are taking matters into their own hands. And they have become famous for fighting back. Endless Thread's Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson explore the complicated, criminal world of scambaiters. ***** Credits: This episode was produced by Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory, I want to introduce you to a guy I know. It's his name Ted. I feel like every story you tell there's a guy named Ted or Gary. Yep. That's really it. Ted and Gary are your boys. We could call him Ted. I was going to call him Charles. I live in Massachusetts, and what I do is, a consultant and trainer around governance and social change kind of related things. And we're neighbors.

And, yeah, you and I are neighbors. I'll be honest. Charles doesn't sound all that thrilled to be your neighbor. I know. He is, though, I swear. Like, we're pretty close. We serve on some neighborhood committees together. I think if he sounds a little rueful at first, it's more the story he is about to tell.

about something that happened to him over the course of five or six crazy days in the summer of 2021, the nature of which is also why we're not going to use his real name because, well, what has been the personal fallout for you? Embarrassment. You know, it's not something I go around telling people,

hey, I was so stupid. Right, well. Just wait. I got a call. They identified themselves. as, what was it, I guess, border patrol? Border Patrol is calling someone in Massachusetts. This cannot be good.

Yeah. And the person on the phone launches right into this intense story with Charles. They say, Charles, some drug dealers have been caught at the Texas-Mexico border with a package, and your name is all over this package. And somehow, these drug dealers, they've got your identity. You know, like, don't tell anybody about this because they've got, you know, they've got your information about your bank accounts. So you need to make your money out of your accounts and put them in a safe place. I think I know where this could be going.

And what's weird about this for Charles is that it seems wild and intense, but also it does seem very real at the time. And it's going at breakneck speed. Like these Border Patrol guys are coming hot and nice. heavy. You know, they switched phones, you know, like they would say, okay, here, talk to this guy, and the guy would identify himself, I'm so and so, blah, blah, blah. And they identified some U.S. Marshal, and I did actually look him up. And, yeah, there was his name. So it all sounded legitimate, serious. So Charles starts doing what they tell him to do, and they tell him to do things immediately. Did you just do it through ATMs?

No, I walked into bank and withdrew a lot of money. While I was doing that, I was on the phone with them, and they were telling me what to say, what not to say, you know, how to be real careful about how it communicated so as not to sort of make the bank folks suspicious. I can just picture that. I'm like seeing Charles in my head going around and feeling this like sweaty, urgency. And I just want to like reach into the past and be like, no, no, let me carry you away from the message. Yeah. Yeah. So first Charles goes into like several bank branches while on the phone with these guys who say they're from Border Patrol and are talking to him through his earbuds while he's like at the bank. And the next step in the process is that Charles has to race all over the state of Massachusetts depositing the money he just took out of the bank into Bitcoin ATMs. And he can't tell anyone about this? Like he can't. find a bank teller. It just, this, I guess I don't fully understand why this has to be so clandestine.

Yeah. They say, don't tell anybody because, you know, because they are listening to you. Okay, vague statement here from the supposed border patrol, but the idea is that the drug dealers have stolen the identity of Charles. And in order to protect his bank accounts, he has to empty his funds from the bank accounts. and put all the money into Bitcoin ATMs, into like a special Bitcoin wallet. Correct. And how much money are we talking? Charles?

Like $60,000? That is more than I was expecting. Yeah. And Charles has now done everything the Border Patrol and the Marshals or whomever have asked him to do. You know, sort of as soon as it was all done, then I sort of asked, okay, what's next? And there was no further. reply. And so Charles really starts to freak out. He's written down a bunch of information during this like several day withdrawing and depositing spree, during which he's driven all over the state with all

of his cash and put it into Bitcoin ATMs. And so he starts calling the numbers the border patrol had been calling him from. But it's all burners. They don't exist. You can't call them back. You know, call them back and nothing happens. I contacted the, I guess the CFPI. And they said, Oh, you can file your report. We're not going to do anything about it. There's nothing to be done. That was it. Nothing to be done.

I filed a report and they never contacted me. Extremely frustrating. But that is why the people on the phone wanted Charles to deposit the funds into a Bitcoin wallet. Once the money moves onto the blockchain, it is near impossible for the feds to trace it. Or at least they won't make the effort for, you know, small potato. like $60,000. They have bigger fish to fry than Charles' bank account. Charles' story is wild and upsetting, if we're being honest.

But sadly, it's not unique. It's true. The Global Financial Crime Report of 2024 says annual losses are $485 billion. Check fraud. 27 billion. Cyber-enabled scams? 10 billion. Impersonation?

7 billion. It's nuts. I just the other day stopped my mom from, quote, canceling a supposed automatic renewal for $400 from the geek squad. They had a bill and official letterhead and everything. A year or so ago, also Amory, two really aggressive guys who called from a New York City number said they were IRS, cops, and they almost had me convinced I had committed tax fraud. And you know what? It didn't help that yes, many years ago, I did have an H&R block guy in Staten Island who was pretty fast and loose with the numbers.

Never changed, Frankie. Hope you're well. I'm definitely still not subscribed to all of those industry magazines. And I am no longer writing them off if the IRS is listening. I got scammed in college. Yeah? I bought this like cleanse. It was like a berry cleanse.

Yeah. Sure. Of course. We all need to cleanse every once in a while. Yeah. I thought it was $50. It ended up being $200. Oh, my. Which was a lot of money for me back then. It's still a lot of money. $200 is a lot of money. Oh, my God. And one friend in particular will never, ever, ever let me live it down. Anyway, the point of the story is who among us has not been scammed at some point in our life?

It's really frustrating. Yeah, it's true. And none of this is new, right? Like the inshittification is real. You know, I think it's getting worse, but it's not new. What does feel new is how much people are fighting back and getting famous for fighting back. We are in a renaissance of creators who spend their time tooling on scammers and their silly, maddening tactics are racking up the views. I use, like, hardwomen.

to pitch my voice. And then if I add like a... An old phone sound to it. You could start to create other characters that are just... Like now I'm an older gentleman. And sometimes I'll end up even to make it more convincing to the scammer. I'll talk with this voice. I was telling you to pay the bills yesterday.

Why didn't you pay the bills? I was trying, but the guy at H&R Block, he wasn't giving me the email. And I'll just try to go back and forth with myself. I'm Ben Barry Cleans scam Johnson. I'm Amory. Only lost $200 and not $60,000, fortunately, Sebertson. And you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from a call center in Asia called WBUR,

and we want all your bank passwords. Oh, God, he's kidding. We don't. Just donate to your local public radio station, will you? Or get grandma to do it. She probably won't even realize what you're making her do. She's kidding. She's kidding. Maybe. Please don't do that. Maybe. We need the money. Anyway. That's true.

So the way this story really started for us was I saw an insane video of this hacker who goes by the handle Scam Bader on YouTube. If you have been watching my channel for a while, you would have probably seen this video in which I got scammers very scared after they realized that me and my team are watching their operation, life through their own CCTV cameras. This kind of thing really does connect with our righteous fury, right? Fighting fire with fire, giving them a taste of their own medicine. For sure, which I think is why there is all of a sudden this kind of glut of scam bait content online. I went down a deep rabbit hole of scam bait content, including the scam bait subreddit,

which celebrates the idea of messing with the scammers. Let's go scam baiting again. Yeah, it's Diaria. Lansing P-A-N-T-Z Oh my God, click on yes Please click on yes Please click on yes on the screen

Okay, right-click or left-click I've been tracing down hundreds of thousands of dollars That has been sent to you I have my team with me We'd like you to answer for that I know where you are Oh my God

I got scared I got scared Someone who is very famous On that scam bait subreddit The Amazing Voices guy I go by Kit Boga or Kit and I have been investigating scammers for a little over seven years now. Kit says he's probably been doing this for longer, but he's been doing it publicly for seven years,

which he kind of just fell into. I didn't plan on doing this as my job. I very much liked my job at the time. Kit's job at the time was software engineer. He says he was just your average millennial spending all of his time on the internet, and he discovered an older viral video of something called Lenny Bot. Lennybot was a chat bot written way back in the year of our Lord 2011, and it was designed to specifically scambate telemarketers and scammers by using 16 pre-recorded audio clips. The bot was designed to sound like an old Australian man, and it did.

Hello, this is Lenny. The idea of Lenny bot is that this, guy in Australia, who the telemarketers would be calling, Lenny, wouldn't really be able to focus on the questions they were asking him in order to get him to give them money. He'd get distracted. He wouldn't answer their questions, really, but he'd keep them on the hook by almost answering their questions, and then bailing. He'd say like, oh, there's a goose at my backyard. I got to go, give me a second. I've got to go look. The creator of Lenny Bot is said to have been inspired by the idea of manifesting the telemarketer or scammer's worst possible nightmare. Because when you're scamming or telemarketing, which we grant you may technically be two different things with the same goal.

Trying to effectively separate people from their money, either for a real service that is not that useful or a not real service that is completely useless. When you're doing this, time is money. So if you've got a mark on the phone and they waste your time and they don't give you the goods after all that, you're losing money. Kit Bogga thought the Lennybot video he found on YouTube was genius. He started to watch a ton of videos on scammers, including scammers that used very specific tactics, like calling elderly people and saying they're representative of Microsoft trying to fix something on their computer. And I immediately thought about my grandparents. Kit had personal experience with scamming.

His grandparents, who aren't alive anymore, were taken advantage of by scams in real life. He remembers this one time going to his grandparents' house and finding a gardener ripping out his grandma's rose bushes. She loved those rose bushes. But the gardener said she'd told him to take them out. Kit didn't buy it, and it turned out to be nonsense. The guy was taking advantage of his grandma by convincing her to pay him to ruin the thing she loved most in her garden. If supervillains and superheroes have origin stories, the Rosebush incident was

Kitts. Scamming really rubs him the wrong way. And internet-based scams where people call elderly people to scam them out of their money seemed especially nefarious to him. If I'm this software engineer, millennial, familiar with the internet and I had no idea this existed, surely my grandma wouldn't have known that this existed. So Kit was like, maybe I can be the Lenny Bot for a minute and be my own version of a scammer's worst nightmare. It took him five minutes to find a scammer phone number.

He called it. The scammer who picked up immediately said that Kit had viruses on his computer and they wanted to remotely connect to it. Kit freaked out. I didn't know what to say it, so I hung up. Nonetheless, he was determined to figure out what he wanted to say. The direct experience on the phone had unleashed his fury even more. And that was just the spark of inspiration to keep exploring. In the coming days, Kit Bogha, a mild-mannered software programming dad,

would begin to transform and focus on a scam-bader superhero mission. The idea was, if I spent 10 minutes on the phone, that was 10 minutes of the scammer wasn't talking to someone's grandma. What then did he buy this computer? 1994. You type something wrong. Ah, no, I double-checked it. Do you know anything about computers?

I already gave you the right as you made the mistake. Why did you do that, Joe? Why'd you pick a three? It looks just like a B. $450,000. Are you f***ing serious right now? Leave it on the phone for 6,218 minutes. Cut the BS, go get your insurance paper, and grab the VIN number.

Yeah, for the Ford, for the F-150. We don't have a for it, sweetheart. Oh, my gosh. This mission would end the software programming life of Kit Bogha as he knew it. It would connect him to a veritable Justice League of scambating superheroes and earn him legions of enraged fans. Three and a half million subscribers on YouTube, thousands blowing up in the Twitch chats. All part of an ever-expanding world of scambate content.

Which you will hear some more. of in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bucks. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast.

There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships Team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help.

Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. Something we didn't realize, and that Kit Bogga didn't realize either at first, was the sheer breadth and explosion of scambate content. It's on YouTube. Got them. I can't say what we did, but we got them, baby. Instagram. Is your chrome?

He's open? Well, when I open my computer, I see little puzzle pieces made of cat barf. TikTok. Somebody just tried to scam me. online, so let's have some fun. Twitch. You're not listening again, Mom. What do you mean I'm not listening again? I'm sorry, I'm a little confused. But a ton of it, a ton of it is on Reddit.

And on Reddit, it's really interesting because while there are definitely scambate superheroes, people with big followings trying to own scammers in a very public and humiliating way, there are also just regular people posting their Ws and L's of messing with scammers in their screenshots. When we talk about scamming, we're talking about something that's been going on for decades. Centuries? But there are a few factors in recent years that really seem to be contributing. For one thing, the evolution of technology, from messaging platforms to the move to smartphones, from landlines,

has been increasingly hard for older generations to grapple with. All of a sudden, your bank, your computer, your Facebook account, it's all software-based in shipping new feature updates that even tech-savvy people are like, wait, Wait, why doesn't it work for me like the same way that it used to? Are you sure that's not just you talking? I mean, it is. That's the thing. And like I feel like I'm pretty tech savvy, just like Charles. Charles was also pretty tech savvy.

So this stuff is moving quickly and it becomes confusing quickly. It's also easier than it's ever been to spoof legit organizations when you're a scammer. And the Internet has only made the selling and using of our contact information easier. And then there's the pandemic. As users flooded online, scammers capitalized, and the tools of the trade skyrocketed. The IRS reported in 2022 a significant increase in text-based scams, otherwise known as SMS-based fishing. Smishing? Smishing. It's called smishing.

Okay. Well, when a random person texts you and tries to get you to click on a link and then steals your data and gets you to expose sensitive information about yourself or your bank account, that's the smithing that we're talking about. Yeah. And that same year, by the way, the FTC said that just the tech scams in the U.S. cost consumers $330 million. All of this leads to another famous scam baiter who noticed the increasingly annoying presence of scammers

during the pandemic. He has a whole full-fledged business devoted to combating this. Humble as he may be about it. I'm pleased you've even heard of me. I'm still amazed that. people have heard of me, but there you go. Yes, this man is Irish and yes, a vast amount of his audience on YouTube is American, which he says is probably why people think he's Scottish,

because we don't differentiate our accents all that well from across the pond. I was getting the Irish, I think. Yeah, me too. Anyway, meet Jim Browning or somebody who calls himself Jim Browning. No, it was actually a spur of the moment thing. It is not my real name because I disrupt multi-million dollar scan. And I'd rather scammers don't know exactly who I am, so they don't come to my door or some night, at least that's the theory anyway. Oh, he does sound Scottish now.

Well, like Kit Boga, Jim has a family. Used to have a different tech job. Worked in IT during the day, played around with scam baiting at night. Then his night work started making more money than his day work, because he monetized his YouTube channel. I was doing the kind of YouTube stuff in the evenings. I wasn't having a lot of time with my family and stuff. So I decided about a year and a half ago, give up the day job and do this for a living.

And now he goes after scammers around the world. It's not quite Robin Hood. But it does have it, I guess there is a sort of crusading aspect to it in a way. I have been called the internet Batman at one point, which I kind of see where that comes from. But I wouldn't see myself in those terms at all. Fair, but like the Batman, Jim uses sophisticated tools to go after bad guys. I run a scam, but in reverse.

I lead on scammers, so I deliberately engage with them. I try to let them play through their scam to its conclusion, and particularly if they try to get access to my computer, I reverse that and I get access to their computer. And I've been able to unravel a whole whole. lot of scams as a result. To me, this sounds like hacking or hacking back. Oh, the old hackback sneak attack.

There are weak points in every scam. And I've been able to try and exploit that, not just to kind of report the people who run the scams to the police, but actually because they, for example, all use these computer networks to make their phone calls, it means that I can tap into those and listen to other people being scammed and warn them. It is truly wild to watch and listen to Jim and people like him do their thing.

Are you in San Jose or not? Why should I tell you these questions, sir? And there's your face. You want to cover the webcam now, do you? That's strange, isn't it? A scammer has just seen a photograph of him and his family on my desktop. I'm shivering. Seriously.

Hello? Is the woman at the Bitcoin? an ATM machine in your premises. She's being scammed. It's the customs and border scam, if you've heard of that. I've saved well over a million dollars even in the last couple of years.

What's interesting, though, is that when you ask Jim if he's a hacker, he'll say no. Kit Bogha, who uses special hardware and a talent for doing voices to do similar things to Jim, would also say no. I often say that I feel a bit

like I'm hacking someone's brain. There's a term called social engineering. I would describe myself much more of a social engineer. And that's not uncomplicated, because a lot of the scamming is coming from places where, if you're American, there might be a language barrier. These are organized criminal gangs, often located overseas.

Scammers in India. It doesn't look like they're calling from India. They use call spoofing. Inside the call center are dozens of Filipinos. When they think of Rome, when scams, oh, it must be Nigerian. You have to admit that there's a lot of xenophobia that plays into how Americans think about and talk about scammers.

But it is also true that one of the things that makes scamming such a good way to make money is the existence of international borders. If you're running a call center, say, getting people to pay a bogus cancellation fee and you're in India and the person paying the fee is in America or the UK, it is hard to get results through the usual channels. That is according to Jim. The very first phone calls that I got, my initial thought was,

if I can trace where the phone calls coming from, maybe I could write to their internet service provider and get them thrown off the network. And naively, I thought that sort of thing would be possible. Yeah, but that didn't work out too well. Because getting an internet service provider in India, if you're calling from the UK to go after a call center in India, that's tricky. In India, there have been many reports about scam call centers bribing politicians,

internet providers, and law enforcement to stay in operation. Jim and Kit have had personal experience with this. Jim went from trying to contact an internet service provider to trying to contact local law enforcement. No response. I can only type in English. and for all I know, they couldn't even translate what I'd written, and it was just been. So I've no idea what actually happened, but naively I kind of thought, maybe if I do send a link, something will happen. But in reality, nothing did.

In some ways, for both Kit and Jim, this reality, the kind of scam as side effect of globalization and resiliency of national borders thing, is the reason that both Scambator superheroes took to streaming in the first. place. They were without recourse. That, and they were also just obsessed. At least, that's what Kit's friends might say. I wouldn't shut up about it. I'd always be telling him about these things I did, the scammers. And one of them one day said, why don't you stream it on Twitch so I can watch? And I was like, oh, okay, cool. So it was just me and a couple of friends. And this combination of frustration and a lack of solutions has just led to weirder and weirder stuff from our scam baiter justice league.

I was playing the boot scoot boogie at like country song and one of the scammers started singing it with me. The rest was history. Kit Boga has 12 people working with him now. He has millions of followers on YouTube and Twitch. He is managed by an e-sports management company, which is like, you know, people who are internationally famous for playing video games. It's like them and Kit Boga.

Oh, and by the way, Jim, while he doesn't have official management representation or a team of 12, he does have more than 4 million followers on YouTube. He also employs people in India to help him do his social engineering experiments with scammers. He actually pays people there to effectively break into call centers and get information, set up technology. It is wild and dangerous work. He uses all of this to intervene in scam calls between the scammers and the victim. Hello. Hello. My name's Jim Browning.

The person you were just speaking to is a scammer. I don't know if you're aware of that. They're pretending to be your bank. And he's got some nice hardware too. So this is the way the scammers would hear me. This is my kind of old woman voice. And I can turn that voice on and off. But the idea is that I lull them into a false sense of security.

I make the same mistakes that some old lady would make on a computer. Is what you're doing technically legal? And no, it isn't. Because, you know, he's accessing someone's computer without their permission, which we should say is kind of what the scammers do, too. Legal or not, Jim and Kit are two of many, many people doing this. And they all talk. There's a discord that we would really love to get invited to.

We're still waiting on that invite. They trade information on the scammers and they trade tricks. And some of these tricks are maybe a little more. above board than others? There's such a wide range of techniques, and in some cases there's some folks will take the vigilanteism,

if that's a word, to a level that I'm not comfortable with. If it's a club, it is a loose club, because different members seem to have different rules. Those rules get different results, too. Kit Boga seems to have a special talent for not just driving scammers

crazy, but getting them to open up as well. They'll call me later on WhatsApp or something and we'll have like a heart-to-heart conversation. And they're like, you know what? For you guys in America are rich. And if you've got 10 grand in your bank and I take 2,000 of it, like what's it to you? Jim hears some of this kind of thing too. And some might say it's a fair question. Which is why, Amory, I wanted to talk to an actual scammer. Oh boy. Here we go. Yep.

So I started with this text that I randomly got the other day from a scam number where the text said, I would like to talk to you about your saloon idea. And I was like, absolutely, yes. Let's talk about my saloon idea. Let's do it. I cannot wait. I've been waiting for somebody to ask me to talk to them about my saloon idea. And so, you know,

I and producer Dean Russell figured we'd get in touch with this person. Should I call them? I think you should call them. To talk about the Saloon Project? Yeah. All right, let's do it. The number you dialed is not a working number. Please check the number and dial again.

Message 3. OK02MN. Well. Oh no. Your saloon dream deferred. I have no sasparilla to pour, unfortunately. And honestly, part of this whole thing is that it really is hard to get a scammer on the phone, even if it's easy for them to get you on the phone or on text.

Hello? I got a call from this number, and I don't understand why I got a call from this number. Ooh, they hung up. Hello, I'd like to give you some money. Hello? You are on our block list. I'm on their block list. list.

Please leave your message after the tone. Hey, it's Mervin. I'm looking for Blurgle. Thank you for calling customer support. This is David? How can I help you? Hey, is my computer hacked? How could I know, sir?

Your customer support, right? Hello? Okay, okay, mixed success. But Amory, producer Dean Russell, who used a different name when talking to scammers for obvious reasons. He kind of hit the jackpot. What is the name, sir? Jake Barry.

Fuck you, Jake's Barry. What's that? I said, hold the line, let me check. Did you just say fuck me? No, I wanted to fuck your wife. Why do I fuck you? Oh, my God. Yes, yes.

Seriously, I'm actually curious, like, why you scam people? I would love to know. I really would love to know. Yeah, I don't have money, buddy. I don't have a good job to take care of my family. So that's the reason I used to scam people for money. Wow. That Dean Russell.

This is, this was unexpected. I know. I think one of the really hard things about this, though, is that Dean and I left this experience kind of feeling icky. Because, yes, of course, there are people in the world who do bad, things and they should be punished for that. And they should be confronted for it too. But at the same time, is any of this the scam baiting, the fighting with the people doing

the scamming? Is it getting to the root of the problem? Kit Bogga and Jim seem to have come to this profession somewhat randomly. But they both say that some scambaters seem to have gotten into scam baiting specifically for the money. And that doesn't feel great because they're not the ones making bank off of these scams. The bosses are. Yeah, which we asked Jim about.

The scammers themselves are humans who often are in desperate places themselves. And so, like, how do you think about that? I mean, I do occasionally, particularly if I can't get access to the scammers, I will flat out ask them, look, I know you're running a scam. Why are you doing this? And I've yet to hear anyone being really truthful about it and say, I do it for the money. Do you have like a code of honor that you live by? Yes, I do.

The code of honor, if you like, I would say would be I will go to the extent of giving them fake information, including fake credit card information. But if I get access to their systems, I would say, will never, for example, attempt to steal money back from them again. Kit also has some lines. He also has mixed feelings. On the one hand, he feels good about taking up time that might otherwise be spent hurting someone else.

But... These are people. And I have kids. And so I think it would be very naive of me to say that if I had, if I was in some crazy situation in which I had lost, you know, my job and lost all hope and I'm like, everywhere I turned to, I wasn't able to, right? Like, my neighbor didn't have any food. Like, I'm going to do, like, let's be, I'm going to do something to get my kids food, right? Like, I think if we're honest about it.

Maybe not a surprising answer, but it is interesting that there's a lot of gray in here, even for the superheroes, which are fake characters. we have made up that usually exist in worlds with lots of black and white. Right. And I want to go back to my neighbor Charles for a minute. Because to me, he had some really interesting things to say about all of this. And I think maybe he gave us somewhere to land on. You know, I could remember being robbed of a little backpack when I was, you know, 14 years old. I still remember that. That's more emotional for me than this.

Somehow because, you know, there wasn't a knife. There wasn't a gun. And it wasn't, it was just all happened sort of this vague, you know, external thing. So it was like, it's almost like it didn't happen. Charles said that the stolen money didn't ruin his life. It was actually money he was thinking about donating. And that's the sad part. He wanted to use that money to make a difference in organizations he cared about. And when I asked him about his feelings towards the scammers, he had this to say.

Well, oddly, one feeling is admiration. These are really skilled people. They're good at what they do. They're also far from alone. You know, there's so many different ways people are scamming us. So is it any different than the robber barons of years gone by? Or the, what was it, the Kennedy money was on alcohol and, you know, the Facebook money. You know, like those are also scammers.

I'll call it the capitalist extractive culture. How is that different? It's like we're in the culture. It's like, where in the culture was, hey, get what you can no matter what. If you did get to talk to them again, if they did pick up the phone, is there anything you'd say to them? Tell me a life story. I'd like to understand kind of how you got to the place of doing what you're doing. This episode was co-hosted by me, Ben Brock Johnson, and an extremely.

wealthy debutante from Ohio named Amory Sievertson, who is just trying to give away a very valuable Steinway piano. It was produced by myself in a Portlandian prince named Dean Russell, who just needs your routing number to transfer $8 million U.S. to your account. It was sound designed by Emily Jankowski, who would like me to pay $400 to cancel my ProTool software subscription. The rest of our team is Paul Vicus, Summata Joshi, Tatter, Caitlin Harrop Franny Monaghan, and Matt Reed. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and the strange voice of an old man that I do not need special hardware to create.

If you have an untold history and unsolved mystery or a wild story from the internet, you want us to tell. You can just spam us and scam us. Endless Thread at WBUR.org. See you next week.