21yo who scams people looking for romance on dating apps reveals tricks
Scammers are seen as faceless, evil people who make Aussie lives a living hell. We decided to track down a scammer, and this is why he does it. Listen to the call.
Costs
Don't miss out on the headlines from Costs. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A young worker has given a first-hand account of what working inside a mass scamming call centre is really like.
Having fled war-torn Syria for Dubai, the 21-year-old was desperate for work and was ecstatic when he landed what he thought was an advertising role.
Instead, he rocked up to a bizarre office location in the middle of the Dubai desert where those inside tried to confiscate his passport.
The young man, who refers to himself as Beard, said he was then held captive and forced to scam people for a living.
He worked alongside hundreds of others aiming to steal money in a ‘pig butchering’ romance scam in a sophisticated operation designed to part unsuspecting victims from their cash. This type of scam devastates thousands of Aussies a year.
That’s why news.com.au has launched People Before Profit, calling on the federal government to make it mandatory for banks to compensate scam victims – just like in the UK. In October last year, the UK introduced world leading legislation making compensation mandatory for scam victims within five business days except in cases of gross negligence.
IT’S TIME BANKS PUT PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS. SIGN THE PETITION HERE.
Beard has become a cog in the wheel of the insidious transnational scamming industry, estimated to have raked in $US1.03 trillion ($A1.65 trillion) dollars globally last year, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance.
“I actually got used to it. I forgot this is not a job. This is a scam,” Beard told news.com.au over a video call.
“Those are not customers. Those are victims. It just gets normal after a while.
“You’d definitely feel bad for what you’re doing. But at the same time, it’s them or you.”
Having just arrived in Dubai after fleeing his war torn home of Syria, Beard needed a job as soon as possible and saw an opportunity posted on encrypted messaging app Telegram as a “copy paste role”.
He thought it was an advertising role and was quickly hired.
The office was miles away from Dubai so he paid for a taxi to take him there.
Drawing closer, he saw a bunch of tall, dreary buildings rising out of the desert sand with nothing else much around, like some kind of dystopian future.
That was when things started to get weird.
Do you have a similar story? Get in touch | alex.turner-cohen@news.com.au
They asked for his passport – but luckily he had left his at a friend’s place back in the city, not expecting he would need it. Others weren’t so lucky and had their passports taken.
His boss then told him he had to pretend to be a girl and get people to invest in cryptocurrency.
“So I asked, ‘so this is a scam?’,” Beard said. “And he (my boss) was like, ‘Yeah, this is a scam’.”
Not only did the fraudster boss not try to hide it, but he seemed surprised that his new recruit was asking.
Apparently it was well known among the migrant community in Dubai that a “copy paste” role was a scam job – deriving its name from scammers copying scripts and pasting them into messenger chats with victims.
Beard was soon put to work. He was on the night shift, working from 5.50pm to 5.50am, six days a week, pretending to be a glamorous woman.
He was paid $US500 a month ($A800) and was provided “free” accommodation there.
Workers were only allowed to leave to get food. Vendors would come and set up food stalls around the scattering of buildings – their sole customer base was scammers.
Given they were stuck in the middle of nowhere, it was “pointless” trying to escape, Beard said.
There was about 100 people living and working on each floor, and about seven floors to a building.
He estimated there was half a dozen buildings next to each other, all controlled by those running the operation.
That would mean there were over 1000 scammers working there.
Only foreigners were hired, Beard noticed, mostly from Africa and India.
There was only a handful of Arabs there, including others from Egypt and Tunisia. Beard was the only Syrian.
Workers were young but some were aged 40-plus, desperate to send money back to their families.
The people in charge were “exclusively” Chinese, Beard said.
“You’d go there, you’d see people singing, playing music, pretending to work when they’re not,” Beard recounted. “Like it got to the point where it’s normal. They don’t even think about it.”
Victims had already been catfished on a dating app, and believed they were continuing the conversation with the woman they had met online. Instead, they were messaging Beard.
He would tell them his name was Annie, aged 28, and working as a hotel manager living near them, “to get them excited to meet us one day”.
Beard sent through various photos of the rich lifestyle the woman he was impersonating was supposedly living including expensive cars, fancy restaurants and places she had travelled to.
Part of the job was also finding out how much the victim earned, to see if it was “worth their time”.
“It’s not the important information I give them,” he explained. “It’s the important information I got out of them.”
If they found out the victim was an American, they were supposed to stop the scam immediately from fear of retribution from US authorities.
Workers were advised to be flirty but “not too much” because that would turn the conversation sexual.
“So we don’t want that because that distracts the conversation, the victim just wants one thing and they don’t want anything else,” he said.
And if the victim began to get doubts, and demanded a video call to prove the woman they were talking to was real, the scammers had an answer for that too.
They actually employed the woman whose photo was being used to catfish victims.
“By everyone’s standards, she was a really nice looking lady,” Beard said, explaining that she was half Turkish, half Ukrainian.
“She spoke English very well. She actually could speak like three more languages.”
Scammers would rush over to her and she would speak to their victims for a few seconds, before ending the call and taking the next one.
“She had a line of people waiting for her to also talk to other victims,” Beard said.
The budding scammer talked to 12 people at once on an average day and his role was to convince them to make an investment into a cryptocurrency portfolio, at which point his victim would be transferred to another team in the building.
But none of it sat right with Beard.
“I didn’t scam a single person throughout the entire time I worked there,” he said.
He started sabotaging by chatting to victims longer than he should and telling them the downsides of the cryptocurrency scheme, saying they would likely lose money.
Beard had watched scam buster Jim Browning on YouTube growing up, who grew a mass following by “scambaiting” – scamming the scammer.
So he decided to tip off Browning, sending videos and photos from inside the scam centre.
Beard managed to convince the scammers to let him go, claiming he needed to go back home to his family. After a tense three hours where they went through his phone, they allowed him to leave. He had deleted all his correspondence with Browning.
A few months later, the scam centre went dark.
Ironically, after his escape, Beard got a job in customer service – and it didn’t pay anywhere near as well as the scamming gig.
“The joke is that these scams gave me an incentive to work for them because they gave me an accommodation,” he said.
“Like I had a bed, I had Wi-Fi, I had like electricity paid for and the water bills are also paid for.
“If someone came here (in the customer service role) and actually got a job and it’s this horrible, then they’d be incentivised to go work there (at the scam centres).”
alex.turner-cohen@news.com.au
Originally published as 21yo who scams people looking for romance on dating apps reveals tricks
‘Disgusted’: Bank’s 40c ‘joke’ to customer
The Queenslander thought it was strange she couldn’t log into her bank account. Then she realised it was the result of scammers.
How young Aussies can get $1321 boost
Applications are now open for young Aussies to get a tax-free $1321 cash boost, but there’s a catch.