ריאיון מיוחד: אשטון בינגהם וארט קוליק נלחמים ברמאים הפועלים ברשת

Ashton Bingham and Art Kulik run a YouTube channel with more than a million viewers where they expose online scammers by posing as vulnerable victims. Their work has uncovered international fraud rings, revealed how criminal networks operate across countries, and even assisted major law enforcement cases. In their interview with Bay Area Innovators, they shared why they feel a responsibility to protect the public and how confronting global scammers has led to real risks, from Now, you know, there's so much on the internet and most of it is entertaining. I would say not everything is useful, but I want to ask you, how do you feel about, you know, doing a show that's, first of all, it's entertaining, has 1.7 million viewers, but at the same time, it's really useful to the people? It's definitely, again, when we by accident discover this pandemic, cyber security, cyber pandemic that's happening online, the more we start exposing the methods of scammers, that scammers, a lot of the different types of scams based on different regions, different countries. And we see, like, how nobody's doing about it, nobody's talking about it. And we're like, okay, so now maybe that's going to be our role, that's going to be our mission to taking care of our neighborhoods, taking care of our community and bring awareness and do whatever it takes to educate people. It really all starts with scam baiting, us putting ourselves out there to appear as a vulnerable victim in the most common types of things we go after, like tech support scams, romance scams and manipulation in that sense. And you know, we pretend to be vulnerable. Sometimes we pretend to be elderly. What else do I need to do now? We literally just let the scammers scam us without taking the money, of course, but we let them lead us down their path step by step of what they want us to do, what they want us to say. And and it's very it allows us to not only document the entire thing and identify the red flags along the way, but also with some social engineering and experience, we can get them to make little mistakes and we get them to reveal things about themselves, sometimes reveal exactly who they are. If law enforcement wants to be involved, our door is always open. But at the end of the day, it's about holding them accountable, raising awareness and teaching people how they work so that less people fall for it. Let me ask you this. Are you at any time worried or scared that some of these, you know, you're dealing with international criminals, would network with, you know, with cartels or whatever. Right. Are you worried that they may come after you if you're bothering their business too much? The biggest danger came to us when we travel, when we travel to India and we shut down three call center and local mafia put bounty on our heads. Right. Because we came and we intercept, interrupt the business that's been making billions for decades. We just got back from Nigeria. So international busts sometimes can be dangerous. So that's why we will bring extra security. We will try to communicate with the local law enforcement and just making sure that we do everything right, especially when you not in your country. So we briefly alluded about the case. I think it was just last month. Right. The 25 arrest, 65 million dollar ring that was apparently it was the Chinese network that was working with the Indian network and they were working together. How did you get involved with that? And what were some of the details that scams come in waves and the way that they operate come in or come in cycles? That was at a time when we were first investigating that particular scam, which is kind of called the refund scam. But it's basically a tech support scam based out of India. But when we started going after it and confronting the cash mules, we confronted one. It was a person of Chinese descent staying at an Airbnb in California. We did another one. It was a person of Chinese descent staying at an Airbnb in California. We did that like three or four more times. And it was the exact same situation where a Chinese person was staying in an Airbnb expecting a box of cash from a victim shipped to California. It was kind of interesting. It's a pattern, but we can't really do much else with it until we got reached out to from law enforcement. That time it was Homeland Security. And they said, hey, those videos you just put up, let's talk. And if you're willing, we'd love to see the unblurred footage, the raw footage. And of course, we always supply that when asked by law enforcement. And it turns out it overlapped with something they were already looking into. And then our videos of confronting those very guys went into this massive indictment that, yeah, it took five years, which sucks, but at least it happened. And turns out, as we learned, that Indian call centers were recruiting Chinese mafia, in this case, a lot in California to be the pickup people here in the states to facilitate the money transfers. That's amazing. Can you please give us a sense of how do you view these scammers? What kind of people are they? Is there any hope for them to become better? I believe people deserve second chances if they want them, but they don't always want them. You know, we've I think our channel might not be the biggest one in the world, but I think we've broken a lot of ground and been a pioneer in a certain way with certain things. And one of those things being really exploring the humanity behind a scammer's actions and one that really doesn't want to do what they're doing and they're doing it for other reasons. One of the earliest stories that we ever did on our channel was this very thing, which was a scammer on the phone that expressed what felt like honest, true remorse and expressed, you know, certain life and life, life factors and cultural differences that led them there that keep them there, not by choice. And so I'm getting blackmailed. It's never, ever, ever black and white, but it is fascinating. And that's why we like to go down those roads. Now, don't get me wrong. We talk to hundreds, thousands of scammers. The vast majority of them are pretty sick, horrible, vile people. But every now and then you'll come across one that has a story that is interesting. And we like to tell those when the opportunity presents itself.