A recent viral video shows YouTubers from the US and UK investigating and pranking scammers
In 2021, when LA-based American YouTuber Mark Rober began getting a lot of scam calls, he decided to dig deeper into their origins and found that a majority came from India. Rober, an ex-NASA engineer-turned YouTuber who is famous for his videos on popular science and DIY gadgets, teamed up with other YouTubers for a year-long project investigating fake call centres in Kolkata.
Their findings were revealed in a viral video that released recently, which detailed how an international team of YouTubers, including Rober, Jim Browning and Trilogy Media, collected evidence about these call centres and temporarily shut them down through pranks like releasing glitter bombs, smoke bombs, cockroaches and rats in their offices.
The video by Rober, which has garnered 35 million views till date, is a part of a popular subgenre in which international YouTubers-turned-amateur sleuths ‘scam bait’ and expose call centre scammers. For instance Browning is an Irish software engineer and YouTuber, whose previous investigations had led to the Gurugram police raiding and making arrests at a fake call centre in 2020.
In 2021, when LA-based American YouTuber Mark Rober began getting a lot of scam calls, he decided to dig deeper into their origins and found that a majority came from India. Rober, an ex-NASA engineer-turned YouTuber who is famous for his videos on popular science and DIY gadgets, teamed up with other YouTubers for a year-long project investigating fake call centres in Kolkata.
Their findings were revealed in a viral video that released recently, which detailed how an international team of YouTubers, including Rober, Jim Browning and Trilogy Media, collected evidence about these call centres and temporarily shut them down through pranks like releasing glitter bombs, smoke bombs, cockroaches and rats in their offices.
The video by Rober, which has garnered 35 million views till date, is a part of a popular subgenre in which international YouTubers-turned-amateur sleuths ‘scam bait’ and expose call centre scammers. For instance Browning is an Irish software engineer and YouTuber, whose previous investigations had led to the Gurugram police raiding and making arrests at a fake call centre in 2020.
This time, Browning helped the team zero in on the four call centres in the video, infiltrated and gained access to the CCTV camera feeds and computers of the call centres. “They were the biggest we could find,” Rober says. San Francisco-based Trilogy Media’s Ashton Bingham and Art Kulik,…
