The Chaser Report - How The Chaser Responds To Scam Calls

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

As Dom and Charles find out, the best way to answer a scam call is more morally complicated than you'd think. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Jaser Report with Dom and Charles. Charles, do you get those annoying telephone calls and text messages and so on, which are trying to scam you. You know, but it seems to be particularly from linked tolling for some reason, a tolling company that I've never used, but every week they send me some sort of an invoice with something clearly wrong in the web address that they attach. I've been getting a lot of ones recently from Australia Post saying that my

detail, my valuable package has not been delivered because I have to update my details with them. And I think that's a good, that's a clever one because it's like, oh, I want to get my package. Yeah, except that as if Australia Post would ever communicate with you in any way. Because my problem with the linked T one is that, yeah, you never use us, but also you don't rush to pay your toll. You know what I mean?

No, that's true. You don't go, oh, well, hang on, we've got to make sure that billion dollar company gets my $4 70. Yeah, that's right. So, I mean, these things come and then also there are all the calls, of course, come in generally in Mandarin. Now, I have to confess, Charles, that I have at times taken a bit of pleasure, and I'm not proud to say this, but in being a little bit of a jerk to the person on the other

end of the phone. No, I think that that's a duty. It's a duty as a human being. to fuck those scammers. To just fuck them because they're fucking crooks. They are. They're just horrible, horrible people.

It turns out the people on the end of the phone, though, Charles, are even bigger victims than we are. I'll explain why in a moment. This is going to be depressing, isn't it? This is from the Australian, so I don't know how much to believe as ever. But it doesn't have anything to do with the ABC or Rip Murdoch, so it might actually be credible reporting here.

What happens is scammers don't just scammer. us. They also scam workers. And what happens is, for instance, says, they quote this article here by Amanda Hodge. There's someone, Rudy, not his real name, who was from Indonesia, young designer, and he had managed to score a dream digital marketing job in the Philippines. I am. And there he was, traveling off, and he ended up $5,000 in debt to the Colorful and Leap Group, which is the name of the business that employed him. And the basically the deal is you owe us $5,000, you have to pay us to $5,000 or you can't leave. And until you do, it's 16-hour days in some sort of a warehouse ringing up and scamming Australians,

Americans and whoever else. So it's indentured labour? It is absolutely indentured labor. It's an absolute nightmare. And the way that it's described, the metaphor used for what they do to the likes of you and me, the people who they scam, it's fattening the pig. They spend a lot of time slowly building up trusts and so on and confidence and then they go in for the kill and they get all your money. And what they do when they manage to get a huge payment from some poor sucker in somewhere like Australia

is a big party. They bang a big drum and everyone stands up and applauds and there's karaoke and barbecue to celebrate doing someone out of their life savings basically. Wow. That is. So in some ways, the idea that scammers should be locked up is true because they are locked up.

They already are. They're already locked up. They're basically slaves who hold a party whenever they. It's so morally complicated. Yeah, and so this guy, Rudy, it got up and he said, he says, I mean, he's quoted here. It was a big celebration because our division achieved its target. Everyone was clapping and standing up and making a lot of noise. And he didn't want to, he said everyone was uncomfortable, but didn't want to make a fuss and stand out and get in trouble.

Right, because they'll be beaten or something. The prison waters. And there's photos here of these. giant scamming compounds. Some of them are in Myanmar, for instance. And yeah, these slaves are done to try and pick up. So this totally changes my conception of how scam factories work. Because I sort of had assumed that like where the victims and the scammers would have a

worker's paradise, like they'd be running these factories. But, you know, they're thick as thieves. They're all going, ha ha ha, you know, and sort of on the same side. But it's sort of just thinking about it, like it makes total sense that, of course, the scammers are also assholes to their workers, right? Yes, of course. That does seem consistent. The way to solve this problem, because, you know, you go, oh, okay, maybe next time I'm being scammed, maybe what I should do is just let them scam me because then they'll be able to earn off their debt quicker, right? Like, in some ways, it's a bit like, you know, charity, right?

To free the labourer. Yeah, to free the labourer. I'm actually thinking that's not really, that's not an empowering solution for anyone, right? No. What actually we need is we need a scammer's union, right? Right. That actually...

The union movement needs to fix this. And the scammers need to go on strike and maybe hold some protest rallies, do some placards. I mean, you know, no end of the... Until they get proper, you know, rights for their scamming. Because, you know, like, As Mark said, you know, the blood of the workers, the blood of the scammers,

is the oil of the machinery of scammering. Is that exactly? Is that what Mark said? Yeah. No, but I mean, this happens in Laos. It happens in the Philippines. In Myanmar, many of these countries in Southeast Asia, be fair to say that in places like Myanmar and Laos with authoritarian communist governments,

it might be hard to unionize and protest. But apparently this now makes more money for the scammer. than the drug trade. Really? Yeah, apparently. And this started happening during the pandemic because the great thing about scamming is you can work from home,

or at least from your prison. So whereas with drug, it involves... You've got to traffic and trade and there's a death and... So these companies, they take their passports away and keep them locked up. And there's this awful story here. One of them is right next to the US base in the Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

There's an example here, like a young African who was basically in a prison and got beaten up and eventually went to the local police station which is run by the Chinese government. But wouldn't the local scammers just pay off the police department? That doesn't sound like a very sensible plan. Well, one of them bizarrely is it's in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in northern Laos

and they went to the police station which was run by the Chinese and the Chinese actually made them give back the passports. That was pretty good going. So it's on the banks at the Mekong River. And it's actually, they've had to close down in the casino because no one's come back since COVID. They've just turned into a giant scamming centre. Well, I mean, what's the difference? Exactly.

So that's the thing. I wonder if next time someone calls and offers you, you know, just to help with your address of your parcel or whatever it might be, maybe we should just sort of say, hey, do you need here? Do you want us to try and get you out of there? Yes. And then you can connect them to the, I don't know, the Australian Workers Union or something to try and give some, some union tips. Our job should be to unionise all the scammers who try and contact us.

That would be one option. We could also do more of an American-style approach where you don't, I mean, they don't really believe in unions over there. Even companies like Apple and Amazon have opposed their workers unionising. What you would do in that case, I think, using the American model of labour relations, is you would arm them. Surely if this is a Hollywood-style story, though, they need to use their sense. skill to then...

Oh, to turn it around. To turn it around. So they've developed the skills of scamming, and then they need to use that against their oppressors. To scam the scars. Is they should, yeah, they should send a little SMS to their jailer going, Hi, Dad, I've just lost my phone, so I'm calling from a new number. Can you call me back?

Which is a common way of starting to scam. And then go, oh, I just need you to drop your... jail keys off to this address or whatever. Just drop my passport off to this address. And the thing is because they're so good at, you know, manipulating people because they've, you know, develop these skills through their work, that they'll be able to do it. I mean, I think, I think self-mancipation is always, you know,

teach a man to fish and he'll fish, he'll fish, give a man a fish, and he'll have something to eat. I can't remember the phrase. But, you know, to teach someone to fish and they'll be fishing in people's crypto wallets. Yeah, teach a man to fish, P-H-I-S-H. Oh, God, Giles. Well, just take a moment to get your aphorism correct while we do this. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens.

Yeah, there's one approach. One thing that D. Madigan does, you know, D. Madigan, the ad guru who goes on gruel. Oh, she is a scammer as well. No, she has this thing where she loves stringing them along and then screenshots everything and posts it for fun. And so someone contacted her recently, I'm sure she wouldn't mind me saying, because she's published, she's discussed this in public. Someone contacted her to pretend to be Stephen Miles, the Premier of Queensland. I presume she knows. And it's hilarious.

Like all the messages are like, yes, I just did the government meeting. And she's like, oh, I just saw you on TV and all this sort of stuff. And if you Google D Madigan for one second, you'd realize she's like a Labor Party campaign. pain operative and would probably know Stephen Miles personally. But this has gone on forever. And so in the end, admittedly her time is more valuable than theirs, but it is quite fun.

And they sent all these, you know, WhatsApp messages and so on. And they, somehow the Premier of Queensland has a lot of time to try to teach her how to use crypto. Right. And this is what they do. What's the angle there? Like Stephen Miles wouldn't go, oh, actually Queensland's budget is now fucked

because we gave 50 cents public transport fares to everyone. The can you help me out by sending me $600 million? That's actually quite possible. What's the end game? But I can see it's, you know, it's the Premier of Queensland saying, hey, invest in this cryptocurrency deal.

And D would go, yeah, that's great. Yeah, that would work. Actually, this story's made it to news.com.com. And they use an AI voice clone of Stephen Miles to ring up. So, yeah, you've got to be pretty careful of this sort of stuff. And if your brain's kind of going, hang on, Does the Premier of Queensland really have time to send me all these messages about crypto trading? Maybe be a bit suspicious.

Well, isn't that the thing, though? Scammers don't want the clearest knife in the toolshed. Yeah, yeah. They want people who go, oh, yeah, stupid. There was a Hollywood star who contacted D. I can't remember where it was, but there's some famous actor who contacted her as well. But no, this is the thing that's really sad is the story from the Australian that I've began this episode with. There are all these examples of people scammed, and there's like some.

priest and his congregation, who thought that he'd found a new love. There's these often people who are down in the dumps and sad and lonely, and who got messages from someone who seems attractive and seems interested in them. And maybe needs a little bit of help with the old crypto. And it is very sad that they're praying on people's emotions. So maybe the thing to do, and this is where I got to for much of my personal life, is to just have no hope at all. So if someone contacts you, thinking, seeming as they might interest you, you just refuse to believe it could possibly be the case. If something is too good to be true, or even mildly good to be true,

then just definitely ignore it and block it from your life. Yeah. And this is, may as well do it when you meet people in person as well, just to make sure no one can scam you. Just to be match fit. That's right, to match fit, exactly right. So I don't know what we do about this. I mean, unionising could work.

I suppose the best thing, maybe if the federal government set up its own scamming platform. Well, no, this is where I was going to go, which is, I think, actually, what you do is you set up a system of, let's call them laws, maybe a constitution, and you codify it so that the people who, the scammers, organize themselves into large organisational units, let's call them corporations, say. And there's a whole set of rules and laws that protect them, so that they can carry out scams. but it's all above board and legal, right? Well, I guess for that to work, though. And then you call it capitalism, and what they can do is they can reinvest some of the money that they've scammed from you into growing. And therefore, they can use some of that money to actually pay, you know, to buy up the media. Yeah, all politicians with donations.

Yeah, and think tanks. And they could sell shares, couldn't they as well in their companies? Yes. So that all the super funds would get involved and they'd become legitimate. it. What a good idea. And then everyone who has a stake in that system sort of then supports it and it can grow infinitely forever and just, and you end up, you'd end up having to mine, strip mine the world's resources to build upon these scams.

And the only people who lose are the little people inside those organizations who are trapped there and being forced to do the scamming. Think all the people of all the people who'd make. money, not the workers, but everyone else. And the workers, the workers wouldn't be any worse off. It would just be the same for they wouldn't even notice that all the money was being made of. See, what I was going to suggest was that we have some sort of, like, implement some sort of

national scam system whereby we, you know, offer visas and passports to the scammers. So essentially we try and get them to migrate to Australia and then we lock them up and take their passports away and make them do minimal labour. Yes. And have, you know, basically try and, I presume all these people will want to get to a wealthy country to stash their money and so on. But it occurs to me that, A, they're probably already here. Probably the people who own these factories. In fact, in one of the people mentioned.

Well, I think actually there's a whole building of them down in Canberra. They've actually set up in this right on top of the hill. It's got a big flag on top of it. I see what you. I see where you go. Yeah, but in fact, one of the people mentioned in this, one of the owners of this scamming network, The wife is Australian. That's an Australian passport.

So there's one. And I just think the thing, maybe the problem in this scenario, Charles, is that we're not doing this. I mean, if the people out there scams, like we've been asking people for money for years, for podcast subscriptions.

And in many ways, by taking people's money for podcast subscriptions and not giving them bonus episodes, we're running a scam as well. So maybe we should get with the programming. And we're the people who are locked up having to run it each day. and are miserable with our lives.

Actually, oh, shit. Should we relocate to Laos, maybe? Although, actually, you'd have to give me back my passport. That's true. Yeah, you're not getting that back. So, all in all, when someone rings you and tries to scam you, I mean, I have seen some videos. There are some very funny videos where people hack into the surveillance cameras

with some of these scam bases, and some of them are absolutely small business owners just trying to make an illegitimate buck. But a lot of them are prisoners. Just, you know, have a bit of sympathy for some of them. or try and scam them back for fun. That seems to be the message. We don't have a clear moral argument here.

Takes the fun out of it. Have I just ruined if they're actually emiserated people themselves. We're going to have to go back to being nice to everyone. Oh, okay. Well, in that case, I will give this guy the password to my crypto wallet. He probably needs it more than I do. Apparently, his wife's very sick. And he might marry me if I play my cards right.

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