Shark Tank Australia judge Sabri Suby purposely gets scammed 100 times

One Shark Tank Australia judge allowed himself to be scammed 100 times in order to lift the lid and teach others to stay safe.

Getting scammed online is something many Aussies try to avoid, but one Shark Tank judge purposely let himself get scammed 100 times.

Sabri Suby, 38, is like every other Australia who gets targeted with telemarketers, scam ads on social media.

And while they are many who fall for these scams unknowingly, Mr Suby wanted to find out what these scams were like and where they came from.

“It’s getting out of control. I (usually) have a little bit a fun with them but this time I decided to just go all the way and just see what rabbit holes of the internet that would lead me down, and what lengths people go through in order to scam people,” he said.

Shark Tank Australia judge and marketing expert Sabri Suby allowed himself to get scammed 100 times in order to investigate how these scam ads work and still fool people. Picture: Supplied

“And I think that with everything that is going on with AI and with Robo calling and all of that stuff is going to become more prevalent. So myself being a man of the people, I have put myself to the task.”

According to the digital marketing mogul, it took very little effort to find them thanks to the algorithms on social media - they found him.

“The algorithms are very smart with basically you things once you click on one and you click on one scam. And that’s it. You fall down a ferret hole of just constant never ending ads for all different types of scams and whether it’s organic content or it’s ads itself,” he said.

“I just picked the weirdest and the wildest, wackiest things that I could find and I thought ‘let’s try that’.”

One of the ones that he came across that he classified as a “scrammy product sold in a scrammy way” was the Pure Himalayan Shilajit Resin.

“It’s this black tar substance that comes up from the Himalayas and from India, and basically it says it contains all of the essential minerals,” Mr Suby said.

“And they market it in a way where it’s gonna double your testosterone, it’s going to quote unquote increase your pencil size and it’s going to do all of these outrageous things for you.

“Crazy AI ads for this one. The ad starts off with like ‘this is what would happen to you if you ate nothing but Shilajit for seven days’. And they just go on to make completely false claims, baseless claims.”

Mr Suby found the most scams came from TikTok and used AI generated content. Picture: Supplied

But the worst type of scams he came across were ones that used AI deep fakes of popularity celebrities and influencers to give false endorsements.

“You’ve got ones that are like AI deep fakes of Mr Beast and they’re selling iPhones for a dollar. And because he’s got such young audiences or there’ll be like a sweepstake app where it’s a gambling app, they’re gonna use Mr Beast to promote it,” Mr Suby said.

“As soon as you enter your credit card, that’s it they’re gonna be whacking that thing, taking your money out and that’s just a straight up scam.”

It’s not just the popular US YouTuber who’s image has been used for these scams, as Mr Suby said he came across ones showing Elon Musk, Scarlett Johansson, Joe Rogan and even Robert Irwin.

The now deleted tweet shows someone bragging about making money from a Mr Beast deepfake. Picture: Supplied

“They take somebody who is a credible figure that has a relationship with their audience. And they just completely steal their identity,” he said.

Beyond using smarter tactics with AI, Australian Association of Psychologists’ president Sahra O’Doherty says scams target people’s emotions to trick them.

“When we’re talking about scam products, or even legitimate products that are sold in quite a scrammy marketing way, it’s often because it can feed into our sense of insecurity, or anxiety about ourselves,” she said.

“So when we’re buying something that we probably don’t need, but it’s being sold to us as though we need it. It’s usually playing into our insecurities that we’re not good enough, or that we don’t fit in with a particular image that we wanted to step in. And it’s often being sold as a quick fix.”

Ms O’Doherty advises people to do their research before they buy anything they see on social media.

Psychologist Sahra O'Doherty. Picture: Supplied

“We do have access to some form of research at our fingertips. We can go through the process of not just trusting the ads or the influencers. We can do a bit of a Google search, we can read reviews, if we have an inkling that it might be too good to be true,” she said.

“We can search for that product with the word scam next to it and we can see if there have been other people reporting something similar.”

And while it might be easy to put the blame on social media companies for the presence of these scams, Mr Suby said it’s up to people to use their common sense.

“You can’t put guard rails on the internet,” he said.

“You need to operate with intelligence and you need to be highly sceptical of everything you see online, and you need to apply critical thinking.”

Mr Suby says trying to control the internet won’t stop these scams from appearing. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Tim Pascoe

With how easy access kids have to the internet, Mr Suby also advises parents to talk about scams with them in order to prepare them for the future.

“I’ve got three daughters, they’re all under the age of seven and already I’m teaching them about this,” he said.

“When we’re in the car and I get a robo call, or I’ll pick it up in the car and I will show my daughter’s first-hand what these people are going to try and do. And then they’ll ask me a million questions about it.

“It’s that critical thinking that you need to arm them with that is going to serve them for the rest of their life.”

Originally published as Shark Tank Australia judge Sabri Suby purposely gets scammed 100 times