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‘Fraud Wars’ Video: YouTube Star Kitboga Fights Scammers With Humor
He baits criminals online, wasting their time and entertaining his millions of followers (don’t try this at home)
Key takeaways
- Kitboga uses humor and fake personas to keep scammers on calls and expose their tactics to viewers.
- His videos reveal how scams work, from scripts to payment demands, and draw over a billion views.
- Despite the entertainment, he warns people not to engage with these criminals because it can be dangerous.
Most stories about fraud are humorless, for good reason: Fraud is a devastating epidemic that costs Americans as much as $196 billion a year, according to a recent estimate from the Federal Trade Commission.
This story is different.
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Meet Kitboga, who has become internet-famous for his YouTube videos of his calls with scammers, whom he annoys with time-wasting faux confusion, pretending to be flummoxed by their instructions to the point where some of the criminals start screaming in fits of frustration.
The calls are often laugh-out-loud funny, while also offering viewers an inside look at how scammers operate. The scripts they follow. The ways they try to keep their target on the line. Their instructions for how and where to deposit money. Their relentlessness.
The videos have drawn more than a billion views on social media and thwarted countless scams in the process.
Kitboga (a pseudonym) recently sat down with Kathy Stokes, AARP’s senior director of fraud prevention programs, for an episode of AARP’s Fraud Wars series, where he explains how and why he’s spent nearly 10 years of his life driving scammers crazy. “It started off as kind of a hobby and very quickly grew into a passion,” he says.
At its heart, his project is no joke, he adds. Kitboga was inspired to start needling scammers after his grandparents, both of whom had dementia, experienced scams. To amuse his friends, he recorded videos of his calls, which he figured were worth his effort because “if I could spend 10 minutes on the phone with a scammer, that was 10 minutes that my grandparents or someone’s grandparents weren’t on the phone with a criminal.”
It took off. He now has nearly 4 million subscribers to his YouTube channel and estimates that he’s had more than 20,000 phone calls with scammers.
How he does it
One thing to note: Do not try this at home. It’s dangerous. Kitboga emphasizes that he has professional equipment and a team of experts protecting him. “I highly recommend not engaging,” he notes in the video. "If you answer the phone, they will continue to call you. It will only get worse.”
He usually wears his signature sunglasses and sometimes wigs for his invented characters (although that's mostly for fun). And even though he shows his face in the Fraud Wars video, he doesn’t reveal his name or location, for obvious reasons.
Kitboga maintains his own “virtual call center” of phone numbers but typically reaches out to the criminals himself after viewers send him contact information they’ve received from scammers.
He then tries to scam the scammers, in a sense, making it appear as though he has a substantial bank account or cryptocurrency wallet to keep them on the line, putting up with the craziness he throws at them.
In one video, he pretends to be an older woman who just can’t understand the criminal’s increasingly high-volume instructions on how to feed money into a crypto kiosk; the scammer loses his mind. In one video, he successfully encourages a scammer to join him in singing a country song (Brooks & Dunn’s “Boot Scootin’ Boogie”).
Beyond the phone calls
A former software engineer, Kitboga has grown eager to find more practical solutions to the scam epidemic. He and his team have developed anti-scam software, called Seraph Secure, that blocks and alerts users to online threats.
He is also working to promote stronger protections around cryptocurrency kiosks, which look like regular ATMs but are favored by criminals to obtain victims’ money (sometimes they claim the funds will be deposited into a “secure account” to protect the victim from fraud). A growing number of states have passed legislation that either limits their use or bans them outright (Indiana was the first to ban them, in March), with strong support from AARP as well.
“To me, it’s just a no-brainer; these things shouldn’t exist or should be regulated in some ways,” Kitboga tells Stokes. “We’re not going to give up. We’re going to step in, and we’re going to do our best to fight back.”
More information
Follow Kitboga at YouTube.com/kitboga.
Call the free AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline at 877-908-3360 to speak with trained specialists who can offer support and guidance if you have questions about fraud or have experienced a scam.
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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