Not really about Kitboga. The author talks to Jim Browning. Very interesting. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html
[Edit: adding the text of the article which was sent to me by a friend from a call center]
Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Image Murlidhar Sharma, a senior police official, whose team raided two call centers in Kolkata in October 2019 based on a complaint from Microsoft. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
Image The Garden Reach area in Kolkata. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
Image Aniruddha Nath spent a week on the job at a call center when he realized that it was engaged in fraud. A lack of other opportunities can make such call centers an appealing enterprise. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.

Fascinating piece published today by NY Times Magazine on scammer call centers in India. The reporter even tracks one scammer down, travels to India and confronts him. Link and article below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

Every year, tens of millions of Americans collectively lose billions of dollars to scam callers. Where does the other end of the line lead?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.

Read full story: medium.com/verasity
On the 4th of February, we hosted an AMA with Verasity Founder R J Mark. Thank you to everyone who joined, we answered a lot of community questions in depth (39 in total!). If you missed it, below is the complete transcript. Exciting information in this, make sure to read it all. 👀
Hello Verasians. I am Bhav, the marketing manager at Verasity and I’m joined by R J Mark, the founder of Verasity. Thank you for joining us for this AMA! :smile:
Mark: Hello everyone.
We will be answering all of the pertinent questions that the community have sent in throughout the week. Once these questions have been answered, I will open up the chat so you can ask further (non-repetitive please) questions, the chat will then close once more for Mark to answer. The transcript of this AMA will then be posted on our Medium.
Let’s get straight into it!
Q1) There will be no deadline on the swap so there is no rush and no fear of losing your tokens. They can be swapped at any time. Is that right?
Absolutely right. There is no deadline on the swap For more details read:
VRA Token & PoV update
Q2) Regarding the ERC777 Token Swap, you don’t need to withdraw to VeraWallet on the day of swap? Can I do it later?
Correct, take your time, there is no rush. You can do it at any time. There is no deadline or end date for the swap. We are making this as seamless and easy as possible for everyone.
Seamless and easy. That’s the way forward ✅Q3) Will we see more movements from the Foundation wallet. What is this about? The Swap?
That is correct. In anticipation of the swap company wallets’ tokens are being swapped via VeraWallet. See the article about this:
VRA Token & PoV update
New Foundation wallets will be created to replace the old ones.
Q4) Any plans to keep staking beyond the 31/12/2021 deadline?
We have not made a decision yet but liquidity mining is very much in play and could replace staking after Dec 2021. We will announce mid-year.
Q5) All the tournaments are free to join. How does that help the company to generate revenue? Is there a place or example where users/players are actually using the VRA token to get a product/service?
_Great question!_The tournaments are free to join since we are focusing on adoption and scaling the number of users we have globally. Bringing as many people to the platform is our priority right now. As we expand and offer user-generated prize pools we will take a commission on the total jackpots as a revenue stream. In addition, other revenue flows will become available to us as we build our user base and launch our video player this Q1.
We will monetize our esports content through our video player within Esports Fight Club by serving ads from our ad partners:
Advertiser Partnership Update
Esports Fight Club will require players to use VRA to purchase subscriptions via several payment systems: VeraWallet, PayPal and Credit Cards (although some tournaments are free for promotional purposes). Winners receive VRA for winning tournaments. Soon players will also be rewarded VRA for watching ads. Verasity profits from the purchase of game credits, subscriptions, tournament prize pools and ads. This is an entire ecosystem all within Verasity.
See our revenue forecast here:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Adoption and scale are key to the success of Esports Fight Club. We’ve made a lot of progress on the platform and are confident we will continue to see further growth in terms of users and a ton more exposure to the platform, and our token $VRA.Talking about adoption and scale… the next question will answer that!~Q6) What is the current Marketing Strategy? How do we differ from other tournament websites?
After creating mass-scale events around the world, we are focusing on adoption and community this year. Spending $10,000 on a big one-time prize pool to attract 1000 teams sounds good in theory. But, after careful planning, forecasting and testing, the results show that the best way is to spread the tournaments out so we reach a larger number of audiences. This consistency and large reach will attract much more than just 1000 teams over a period of time. The best place to do this is by sponsoring streamers and influencers, who each have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of fans.
For the past week, for example, we’ve been running a Valorant Community Tournament with Esports Fight Club’s first partnered streamer, Mika Daime. The turnout has been massive! Qualifier 1 was filled up with the max slots so quickly, that we had to create a Qualifier 2 just to fit all the teams in.

1. Most streamers we aim to partner with can easily bring in 64 or 256 teams to a community tournament hosted by Esports Fight Club, for a fraction of the price
2. With the same budget as a big tournament, of the $10,000 we would have spent on a single tournament, we can obtain approximately 540% more users by repurposing that budget for the influencer and streamer tournaments.

For a full list of upcoming features such as the Marketplace and VoD section read our full Marketing and Adoption post:
Marketing, Adoption, Tournaments 2021 (Updated)
It’s key for people to understand what we aim to do with the tournaments in terms of marketing. We read a lot of comments about the “low prize pool” when we announced the Mika Daime tournament, hopefully the answer Mark provided sheds light on that!Everything we do at Verasity is calculated. 😊Do check this out if you wanted a full read on our Marketing and Adoption post for 2021. 👍🏼If you think you’re good at some of the games we have available on Esports Fight Club, join in! The partnered streamers we have will be hosting a lot of community tournaments, such as Mika Daime!Q7) How often shall the revenue estimates (status update) be updated and is there any new estimation?
We will update the community every six months on revenue forecasts. There are no updates from our last announcement which can be found here
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter with notifications turned on, so you can get all the updates as they come through!https://twitter.com/verasitytech
Q8) Have you changed your business model? Because at the beginning it was mainly about publishers.
Our fundamental model has not changed: Video publishers attract audiences to watch video content and ads. Users are rewarded for it, thereby increasing engagement and monetization.
This model has not changed. What has changed is the type of video publisher we are pursuing. Prior to COVID-19, we pursued traditional publishers. With COVID-19, we saw the opportunity to pursue gaming publishers and more specifically esports publishers. More importantly, we created our own tournament platform: esportsfightclub.com. This allows us to control our own environment, launch our own proprietary video player, own our video content, run ads on our player, and charge subscription fees as well as take tournament fees.
But actually publishers and content are publishers and content whether it’s gaming or news.
It’s great to see how Esports Fight Club will have it’s own video content up on the website so that users will be able to watch the content to earn $VRA by using our own video technology, then use the $VRA to join tournaments, or buy hardware from trusted partners 👀Exciting stuff!Q9) Where can I find info about the Founders token unlock schedule?
Tokenomics and Founders token unlock schedule can be found here:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Q10) Does VeraWallet speed handling withdraws scale up painlessly when user amounts boom? And shall there be enhancements to user experience if we for example have tens or hundreds of small reward withdraws daily?
We are adding automated withdrawals for small amounts to the roadmap but first have to complete the swap and add the security protocols. We won’t risk our users’ investments.
We simply don't want to risk our secure environment.
Q11) Are there any plans for compounding rewards for the VeraWallet staking?
No, absolutely not. The simple interest we are paying now is already high.
Q12) Bit confused about the VeraWallet staking rate after March. Can you clarify?
The staking reward rate is 0.1% per day (36.5% per annum) until 31 March 2021 when it becomes 0.07% daily (25.55% pa) until 31 December 2021.
Q13) When can I instant stake with BTC?
Good news, BTC is already available in VeraWallet for Instant Stake together with ETH, BNB and USDT.
Try Instant Buy and Stake out for yourself here:
VeraWallet - Official VRA Wallet
Instant Buy and Stake has been a really popular update to VeraWallet. Great to see the community loving it. 👍🏼Q14) With the recent developments on Cardano, and the ease in which ERC-20 tokens can migrate to this superior to Ehereum platform, are you considering following suit of great projects like Celsius to move VRA over to Cardano? I know we are still a bit hurt with Binance VRAB. I understand it is not an easy decision. Just interested in what you think about the future on Ethereum.
We gave this a lot of thought and investigation and as the community knows we have experience with token migrations :)
Please see our latest update on the VRA token swap to ERC777 and Proof of View:
VRA Token & PoV update
As to Cardano — the liquidity is really small compared to ETH alts. For example on Kucoin it’s volume is less than $2m per day. Even on OKEX it’s only $3m. 50% of Celsius’ volume is on Uniswap which is the majority of the liquidity and is not on any Tier 1 exchanges. Aside from the lack of features that we need for PoV, after our last experience, we are very reluctant to join with mainnets that are generally illiquid. Celsius’s solution is to provide the liquidity themselves through Uniswap which is limiting in our view. We believe sticking with Ethereum is the right way to go and the market seems to agree with this as well.
Q15) The new VOD platform, when is it going to be finished and in use?
We are working on it now and expect it to meet the roadmap target of Q1: see verasity.io for the roadmap.
Can’t wait for it to be released! 🚀> Yes, this is a huge milestone for us and opens us up to so many possibilities.Q16) Is liquidity mining still in play? Will this replace the staking rewards after December 2021?
Good question. Yes, liquidity mining is very much in play and could replace staking after Dec 2021. We have not made that decision yet but will announce as soon as we do.
Q17) Are there new partners/publishers in the trend of gaming for the ad stack?
Yes, FB, Google and others. Please see:
Advertiser Partnership Update
In total 17, many specializing in gaming.
I don’t think today there are many ad networks that are not into gaming. It's such a huge audience sitting at home during Covid.
Q18) Micro tournaments: could you arrange tournaments yourself, like a national tournament for example?
The Esports Fight Club platform is fully self-managed, so yes, you could set up large tournaments and be the admin and sponsor. We would definitely like to see this happen by our community members. This quarter, our admins and developers are focused on A/B testing different tournaments with multiple communities to see if we are missing any critical features demanded by gamers. An article will be coming next week about micro and partnered tournaments. We will explain how these increase platform adoption which benefits both influencers and Esports Fight Club.
If anyone does host some tournaments, message me! I’d be happy to join a few… dust off my skills. I heard Rob (Our Finance Director) was a bit of Counterstrike wizard in his day… 😂Q19) Why are the tokens bought via the instant buy taken from a pool which dilutes the total supply? This is like raising new capital for $VRA at every buy instead of us token holders getting a price increase.
These are not purchased from a pool. If you mean that Foundation tokens have been transferred to VeraWallet, see the article:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
In the Total VRA Supply, line 9, this VRA is already taken into account as part of both total supply and circulating supply. It does not increase either. I think this is really clear.
Q20) Asking about the “Instant buy and stake feature”. If someone buys $VRA using this system, there is no transaction on the blockchain. You say you buy directly on exchanges but no proof.
Buy backs of VRA do not happen instantly and we don’t announce buy backs in advance to avoid speculation. We don’t share our VeraWallet addresses as we have stated before. We are not going to provide speculators with tools to make a margin on each purchase.
Q21) Do we stay on the Ethereum network?
Yes, see the article:
VRA Token & PoV update
We are swapping our current ERC20 tokens to ERC777 which is essentially an upgrade to a more modern and fuller feature set Ethereum token.
For anyone just joining the chat, make sure you read the article above! Tons of important and exciting information.Q22) From the Foundation wallet tokens have been unlocked in the last 50 days and added to the circulating supply. How is our token deflationary?
If you mean that Foundation tokens have been transferred to VeraWallet, see the article:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Foundation tokens are not locked and the article clearly states they are unlocked. In the Total VRA Supply, line 9, this VRA is already taken into account as part of both total supply and circulating supply. It does not increase either. We specifically provide for ALL Foundation tokens, allocated and unallocated, as part of the current circulating supply so this is NOT adding to the circulating supply.
Q23) Asking about adoption figures. You claim to have had 8M people looking at your gaming videos (mostly fakes views as the counter earned millions in hours).
The adoption figures were not fake or exaggerated, it is important to understand that this number is a combination of different metrics, all of which ensure one thing: People viewed our live tournament page. This number includes:

• Unique gaming viewers landing on our page to be able to find the stream in their native language (English, Korean, Hindi, Mandarin and Nepali)
• Social media followers and curious gamers who landed on our page after subscribing to our contests, looking for airdrops or just by following our different marketing campaigns. These account for the steady and regular growth of our landing page as we ran these campaigns all-around the globe and 24/7 at the end of the tournament. The livestream was embedded onto the homepage of the website, so everyone who visited our website was also able to watch the tournament
• Lastly, the contestants, productions and influencer’s traffic from sharing our streams was what mostly caused big traffic, especially during the play-off and later stages of the tournament.

Although it was difficult to collate all the viewer statistics we believe them to be accurate and fair.
To see the full statistics of Ultimate Warrior Showdown 1, read here:
Ultimate Warrior Showdown Tournament Round-Up and Adoption
Hope that clears up some FUD! 👍🏼Q24) Asking about partnerships. You say you have partnerships with
Stripe, Tencent Games, PayPal. The truth is any website can integrate these payment/connexion modules without partnership. You just need to read their website and implement it on your website.
Of course, you can add Stripe and PayPal to any website, but try adding them to a crypto-based website and see how far you get. There are no crypto products websites or related services (other than specific financial services) that are supported by Stripe and PayPal because they are not allowed. To obtain these payment services, you need to have special permission and follow a rigid protocol. And Stripe expressed interest in working with Esports Fight Club to reach out to video publishers with EFC to give us access to video publishers worldwide.
As to TencentGames, you need to get their specific permission for certain tournament events and follow their rules. We would be unable to use their logo and name in our marketing material without this. It’s not simply signing up for them. So yes we consider this a partnership because they plan on additional events with us which they now support.
Working with major brands including PUBGM, Tencent, Athena Gaming and Warmania gave us the clout to include major esport teams in our tournaments who will participate in future tournaments as well: FaZe Clan, Orange, T1, Elementrix, Nova, Onic and others. And now because of the history, Blizzard is prepared to provide licenses for all their major games.
We are also in discussion with peripheral manufacturers to support our marketplace launch later this year. As soon as agreements are reached, we will jointly announce sponsored product peripherals that will be rewarded in our tournaments.
Q25) Some things on your roadmap get pushed forward. Why did do you do this?
Our development team has been together doing projects for over ten years. This is normal in large scale development projects. For example, we decided after the large Esports Fight Club tournaments we put on that we needed to finalize and launch the Video sharing platform prior to some other features on the roadmap because without it we would not be able to take advantage of many opportunities including monetization opportunities of the exclusive VOD content that only we could re-publish and add ads to. This pushed certain product features into Q2. Another example is PoV. Initially we thought we would go with proprietary blockchain because there was no other solution that would allow us to support PoV. That changed with the release by Ethereum of ERC777. As a result PoV timeline targets changed so that it corresponds to the release of ERC777 as well as the ability to use it for the Video sharing platform. So in effect, the video-sharing platform came in _much earlier than expected_which pushed out other features/products to accommodate this change. Business decisions and external events impact on the roadmap and it would do Verasity and the community an injustice if we just blindly followed a roadmap that becomes slightly outdated every quarter and greatly outdated every year. It is this flexibility that allows Verasity to take advantage of new information and technologies in real-time. And to push out new products earlier in the roadmap such as the video-sharing platform.
Q26) Proof-of-View™️ so nice!
When will it be a Patented POV?
The average time for a patent to be granted is 3 years. We’ve just started our third year as a pending application so we hope it will be in 2021, however our patent lawyers have told us to expect further delays due to covid. Fortunately this won’t stop the release of Proof of View which can go ahead with ‘patent pending’ protection.
Update: The patent was granted a few minutes after the AMA ended!
— @verasitytech
Q27) Will there be an app for download on your phone soon? For Staking. Feeling a little insecure have it online on your website
Actually, our mweb and web applications are much more secure than a mobile app. Mobile apps are much easier to hack. Although we have not been hacked, some users have been hacked via their mobile phones but because we have a manual delay, we were able to stop the loss of tokens. The good news is that now with the swap to ERC777 we can disable any wallets that have stolen VRA and return the VRA to the original user. We do have mobile apps on the roadmap but won’t likely support staking because of the security issue and it is not a priority for us.
Q28) Not try to fud here, but would like to get an answer in AMA to suppress all fud in the future 😁
Financial status company. There have been coins sold for listing on an exchange (still to come?). Was this something that was not planned (like extra opportunity to get listed) or are funds becoming empty?
Current resources held by Verasity fund the project roadmap for the next 12 months. We forecast reaching profitability in 2021 which will finance the continuing runway thereafter. As you point out not all listing opportunities were included in the forecast and we stated that: “In the future, additional listings and expenses may require sales of VRA from the Foundation Reserve”. See the funding update here:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Q29) The VoD update is a little bit unclear for me. Maybe you can tell some more about it. To the looks of it, it is a mix between YouTube and twitch but with PoV to earn $VRA.
PoV on VODs is a key feature for us and for our large ad-stack network. While we are growing our partnerships with community tournaments and adding more games and influencers on EsportsFightClub: we want our reruns to be monetized, available at all times on our proprietary platform and browsing page. Think of it the way Twitch highlights previous streamer’s lives automatically but on a larger and customizable library for viewers to earn VRA and for Verasity to monetize via its ad stack.
And we own several terabytes of gaming and esports video content which will launch with the new video platform in Q1. This is actually massive, because on launch we will have a ton of video content to monetize!
Q30) You seem to have many products but I don’t understand how they work together?

• The Esports Fight Club platform — lots of features already available including global and tournament chats, user created tournaments, detailed tournament customization options
• Proprietary video player — in internal beta for launch Q1
• Proprietary ad stack — in internal beta for launch Q1
• Our own esports content — all the content rights from the tournaments and other gaming content owned by EFC &Verasity — this VOD will be monetized on launch of the video platform in Q1
• Our belief that we can drive large streaming numbers via esports tournaments
• Rewarded Video for these users to watch our content and ads on Esports Fight Club and not on YouTube or other platforms by utilizing VRA to engage and monetize
• A large number of ad networksthat include Google AdMob — Signed on
• Proof of View smart contract view verification (on-chain) — now a reality with the swap of ERC777 to fully build out PoV with all its features on the network.
• VeraWallet as a payment system (together with Stripe &PayPal) throughout the Verasity network.
• In Q1’2021, we will put many of these parts together to start scaling our own video player with our ad stack, producing ad revenues in addition to our other revenue streams.

Q31) What games does Esports Fight Club support now?
PUBG mobile, Free Fire, Counter-Strike GO, Valorant, PUBG and Ludo is about to be launched.
🚀🚀🚀 Great game selection, so far.Q32) Any near-future plans to expand your marketing?
At Verasity, we have a large marketing team that devotes itself behind the scenes to increase our awareness in the cryptocurrency community and reach as many people as possible.
Although we have community groups in more than 10 languages, our local group managers translate all the news, updates into their own languages and publish them in local forums and groups in real time. Thus, we significantly increase our chances of reaching communities that do not speak English. Verasity Spanish, Verasity Korea & Verasity India are already large groups and growing.
We will continue to use media sites, influencers, and all other advertising sources to spread our news in the future as in the past. Gamification marketing opportunities are very important to us as can be seen in LunarCrush.
In return for these efforts, we have gained a great community support that grew slowly but surely. Our marketing efforts will continue to scale. Our goal in this regard is to continue without stopping until every individual in the cryptocurrency community speaks about Verasity.
Our social media metrics have seen a consistent and phenomenal increase over the past year due to our marketing efforts, read here to find out more in detail:
Verasity Social and Adoption Metrics
For us the most important metrics to see how we are doing in socials is LunarCrush:
VRA - VERAsity Insights | LunarCRUSH
LunarCrush Altrank is the best stats measure of Alts social marketing success out of 2100 popular Alts. We tested many marketing ploys to rank highly. When something works, it’s clear in LunarCrush. Competitions like AltWars simply work. This is the meaning of crypto exposure when the Altrank increases in LunarCrush which measures all social volume, % change per 24 hours, and social score. Even with our volume which only ranks 550 out of 2100 Alts, our Social Volume pushes us in front of much bigger tokens such as OMG, DOT, LINK, CHSB and others. Clearly our marketing is working.
The community support has been phenomenal. It’s been great to see how supportive the Verasians have been. We wouldn’t be anywhere without you guys! So thank you from the team.Especially during the AltWars contest recently… we owned! 👍🏼 Power of the Verasians. 🤝Q33)Have you heard about gaming projects Exeedme and Crowns and how can you compare them to Verasity?
We did! Exeedme is an exciting project revolving around gamers personal skill and players betting against themselves (user-centric) that is just at its very inception. They are not competitors as our model (Community, content and tournament centered) has broader purpose and we dont and wont support betting because it will be rejected by many of our partners.
Crowns Token, from Seascape, is a DeFi economy blockchain made for developers building their own online games but who cannot/don’t want to focus on the technical transactional side. Although they are very promising for simple browser and other types of games, they are just not targeting the Esports market and offer, at best, support for upcoming indie-browser games studios.
We would not be able to partner with Exeedme because of betting restrictions but Crowns could be interesting if the games developed are popular with our viewers.
Q34) Are there any plans in the near future (next several months) to list on an exchange that allows full KYC trading for US citizens (e.g. Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Binance US, etc.)?
This is hard for us. The regulatory environment in the US is not friendly. Since we are not regulated in the US, the risk of listing on a US exchange and the SEC bringing a claim is quite high. At this time we are avoiding this. Lets see what happens with the new SEC Chair who is quite familiar with blockchain. Should he articulate straight forward rules that can be followed and which will not be changed every couple of months, we will consider it then.
Q35) What is:
1. Business structure
2. Marketing plan for next year
3. Customer acquisition costs
4. Execution plan on tech side to deliver
Business structure of Verasity:
Development team structure is flat with these functions:
Blockchain developers, Backend developers, highload & security developers, Full stack Developers, web/mobile frontend developers, mobile only devs, Testing & QA, Finance.
For more about the Verasity business model and forecast see:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Marketing plan for next year can be found here:
Marketing, Adoption, Tournaments 2021 (Updated)
Customer acquisition costs
We will provide CAC when we are profitable.
Execution plan
See the roadmap on verasity.io
And finally. the last question on the list…🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁Q36) Do you have an update on exchanges? The one that was hinted end of last year and more to come?
Very important issue for us and the community. We fully appreciate the necessity for additional volume and liquidity. After the last exchange hack and issues with OKEX, we were thrown off balance but had expected to list on a new exchange by now. Mistakenly we announced prematurely and then ran into the necessity of completing the VRA token swap before we list on a new exchange. Obviously, we want to now avoid having to swap tokens on a new exchange. So right after the majority of the current exchanges we are listed on complete the swap (this month), we will continue with our listing plans. We are well on the way with 2 exchanges but don’t think it’s prudent to provide more information until they announce the listing themselves. The expectation is still for at least one exchange in Q1. Please bear with us on this. We will get there.
Been a great AMA so far. Cleared up a lot of questions and hopefully made you all as excited for the future as we are. Tons of great new updates to Esports Fight Club coming this year and a prosperous year for Verasity is definitely ahead.Thank you Mark!Will be now opening the chat for the Verasians to ask some additional questions.Will be closing the chat shortly after and we can get some more answers out. The gates are opening! 😁
Additional questions
Q37) When the Verasity Game Jackpot price will be held again? We are waiting for so long.
New jackpots are coming onto the platform but for upcoming games like Ludo which will be announced later this month.
Q38) Is it possible to create something like a create your own tournament where I can play a 1vs1(or 2v2 5vs5) against another player(s) in any game anytime (like in 30 minutes) and where I can set for example a winning price of 100k VRA. and both players have to send 50k before the game to a smart contract and afterward it automatically gets sent to the winner?
Esports Fight Club allows users to create their own tournaments choosing from the available games list. We are constantly working on expanding the list of available games and are open for suggestions. The players deposit VRA to the Esports Fight Club account and use these funds to send money to the prize pool. It's quite simple to set up and you can do it for any amount and any number of players and as admin, you have complete control of the size of the pot, how it is shared in % for winners when to start, etc. Its a fully self managed platform that works now. Just go in and set it up today!
Q39) Hi Mark, regarding the plans for in-game advertising and in-game rewards this year, could you describe your vision on this? Is Verasity currently discussing this topic with certain game companies, and how exactly would it work in practice once achieved? Any details you can share with us would be highly appreciated!
The way we view in-game ads is our ability to provide our logo or some other image that would be part of the game interface, such as the floor or walls. This already exists and is popular. We are in discussions now with game developers to add Verasity/VRA. This is a high powered marketing tool that will get our name into many gamers’ faces. These are native images in effect. For advertisers that want to use native images inside our broadcasts or VOD, they get stitched into the ad server in parallel to the stream and we get paid for the ad inventory. In-game rewards are still in development but the vision is for users to be able to click on an object in the game and get rewarded for doing so, not dissimilar to clicking on an add and getting a higher CPM.
About Verasity.tv
REWARDS BASED PLATFORM FOR ESPORTS, GAMING AND VIDEO ENTERTAINMENT
Verasity provides proprietary technology uniquely rewarding gamers, viewers and publishers. Verasity is a crypto-based platform with the VRA token that aims to revolutionise the online advertising business. With its innovative Proof of View system, advertisers are able to guarantee their video ads are seen and not ignored thanks to smart contracts on the Ethereum chain, while viewers are able to earn VRA simply by watching the content they already consume. Verasity has a focus on gaming publishers and esports.

• The first platform to provide user-generated esports and prize pool tournaments supported by both Fiat &Digital Tokens.
• Video gaming content monetized by Verasity Ad Stackand Proof of View (PoV)
• Enables tokenized rewards(VRA) as well as loyalty schemes within the video player VeraWallet
• Supports over 2 million video publishers with our SDK products(overlay on video players) to increase engagement and revenues by 35%. See example publishersand videos here.

Verasity revenue streams include:
Game subscriptions, prize pool commissions and video ad revenues. Read about the tokenomics, forecast, buy back and burn here.
📖 Read our latest adoption metrics and one page overview
📈 Find where VRA (ticker) is trading onCoinMarketCap
VRA can be staked for 36.5% annual interest at https://verawallet.tv.
Follow Us:
Medium: https://medium.com/verasity
Twitter: https://twitter.com/verasitytech
Website: https://verasity.io
Telegram Token Discussion: https://t.me/Verasity_Official
Telegram Token Announcements: https://t.me/verasity
Verasity Gaming: https://t.me/verasity_gaming
Facebook: https://facebook.com/verasitytech
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/verasity
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/verasity
Blockfolio Signals: Follow VRA to receive updates straight from the team
Join our local groups, we have support in the following languages
Brazilian chat 🇧🇷 — https://t.me/Verasity_BR
Indonesian chat 🇮🇩 — https://t.me/verasityindonesia
Japanese chat 🇯🇵 — https://t.me/verasityjapanese
Korean chat 🇰🇷 — https://t.me/Verasity_Korea
Persian chat 🇮🇷 — https://t.me/verasity_irn
Russian chat 🇷🇺 — https://t.me/VerasityRU
Spanish chat 🇪🇸 — https://t.me/verasity_spanish
Turkish chat 🇹🇷 — https://t.me/VerasityTR
Vietnamese chat 🇻🇳 — https://t.me/Verasity_Vietnam
Philippines chat 🇵🇭 — https://t.me/verasity_philippines
Indian chat 🇮🇳 — https://t.me/VerasityIndia
WeChat — PM @cryptomeo on Telegram
If you are a Game Developer or Video Publisher and want to grow your audience and revenue by 500% click thelinkto talk to the team
AMA with Verasity Founder, R J Mark was originally published in Verasity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
-- Integrate with Verasity:
👩‍💻verasity.tv
👊esportfightclub.com
🎮games.verasity.tv
🕊twitter.com/verasitytech

Section One: Assets and Debt

• Retirement Balance: $84,000 This is based on combined balances in my IRA accounts (Roth + Rollover). My current company, which I’ve been working at for 6 months, doesn't offer 401(k) matching until after the first year of work - so I’m waiting for that year mark to start contributing to one.
• Equity: ~$550,000 This is the current market value estimate of my home, a small 2 BR condo just outside of Manhattan, from Zillow. I purchased my home in summer of 2015 at a closing price of $484K. I put down $284K for the down payment (from my savings and investments which I had slowly accumulated since I was 15. My dad helped me open my first brokerage account at the time and encouraged me to keep investing and diversifying my portfolio as I grew older; this proved invaluable when it came to having the funds for my down payment a decade later) and took on a 20 year mortgage for the remaining $200K. Just last summer (June of 2019), I paid off the remainder of the mortgage balance and am now debt-free. The timing of the payoff was mostly motivated by a city-wide property revaluation assessment last year which bumped up my property tax payment to almost 3X the previous amount.
• Savings account balance: $139,000 I have this in cash in an online savings account with Ally. I normally would have invested some of this, but ever since March and with the ongoing uncertainty with the virus, the presidency, etc. I haven’t felt comfortable doing so. I am also considering buying a second condominium near where I am now that I could either rent out in the future, or move into myself and rent out my current place instead for rental income, so I want to keep funds liquid for the time being.
• Checking account balance: $3,500 This amount is split across two banks - one with Ally and the other with Chase. I keep above the $1,500 minimum at Chase to avoid any fees to ensure I can withdraw cash at one of their ATMs if needed.
• Credit card debt: $0 I place almost all of my purchases on one of two credit cards, but pay them off in full every month (and make sure to redeem the bonus points for cash back!) The total I’ll have charged across my two cards at any point in time usually ranges from $0 to $600 dollars.
• Student loan debt (for what degree): $0 I have an undergraduate econ/business degree from an Ivy League that I’m so grateful my parents were able to help me achieve without having to worry about accumulating a huge student loan for. They started a 529 account for me a little later than ideal (when I was in middle school - I’ll go into more detail in the next paragraph) but saved aggressively leading up to when I graduated high school. They were able to cover the majority of my tuition + room and board this way, and I helped cover the rest through several scholarships and working on campus.
• Mortgage: $0 Paid off last year! This was definitely one of my proudest recent accomplishments. I’ve always lived fairly frugally, due mostly to my childhood experiences and background. If there’s anything I could have done differently, it would have been to get a mortgage for a shorter term (versus the original 20 years) so that I could have gotten a lower rate and paid less in mortgage interest.

Section Two: Income

• Income Progression: My first job was at McDonald’s when I was 15, and I started with the minimum wage rate of $5.25/hour. In high school, I switched to working retail at Kmart and then every summer of college, worked at various paid internships for the full summer in addition to working on campus at various jobs (from cashier to research assistant). My junior year summer internship was at a firm that I would eventually return to full time after I graduated. I've been working full time for 8 years now, and my starting salary was ~$60,000. I started off working in analytics for a financial service firm in NYC and have changed jobs every 2-3 years since then. I primarily stayed in finance up until last year, working my way through steady salary increases each year and with each job change. I had begun looking for a new job and industry right before the pandemic hit in March as I was getting bored and frustrated with my role at the time; I had actually interviewed for my current role right when interviews were all being changed to virtual and didn’t hear back until May as the company was dealing with the big shift to work from home and figuring out headcount for the future. Thankfully my role was kept and I officially started working at my current company in the media/tech space in mid-May. My current annual base salary is $110,000 with a 10% annual bonus ($121,000 all-in).
• Main Job Monthly Take Home: $5,800 This is my final take home, which is paid out bi-weekly (my average paycheck amount is around $2,900). This is after deductions for health insurance (dental+vision), a healthcare HSA ($100 a month), and a pre-tax transit account ($100 a month). Retirement contributions are currently on pause until I hit my one year mark next May and qualify for matching contributions to a 401(k).
• Side Gig Monthly Take Home: ~$890 I have a couple sources of income from Instagram, one of which is my dedicated food account (75K+ followers). For this account, I don’t have a steady stream of income but reap the benefits in various invitations to restaurants in NYC - I’m invited in for a meal (usually with a guest), and for posting photos and stories featuring the restaurants and dishes, have the cost of the meal covered. For sit down meals, however, my guest and I make sure to cover the tip for the service. I’m occasionally shipped food/drink items to share as well. If I do make any income, this is from infrequent brand or restaurant campaigns that I’m contacted for; depending on what’s required in deliverables, these can range anywhere from $300-$3,000. The pandemic definitely impacted this year, but for 2020, I’m on track to have earned ~$6,500 from these. I am also helping 2 friends of mine who started a small business in July with some photography and social media. I post on their social channels and do larger product shoots 1-2x a month, and get $350 a month for this work.
• Any Other Monthly Income: $300 My property also has a gated parking spot included with the deed; so even though I don’t have a car, I’ve found a “tenant” for the spot since I bought my place five years ago. We sign an annual lease every October for $3,600 for the upcoming year, which comes to $300/month.

Section Three: Expenses

• Property Tax: $767 (paid quarterly at ~$2,300, this amount changes quarter to quarter, so I’m using an average for the past year)
• Homeowners Association (HOA) Fees: $434 (this covers water, garbage, and some building insurance)
• Condominium Insurance: $54 (paid annually at $650, my HOA fees cover some initial property insurance, so this is specific to my unit).
• Retirement Contribution: On pause for now as I wait to hit the year mark at my current job to get matching 401(k) contributions. I also want to keep some earnings liquid for a potential future real estate investment.
• Debt payments: $0, aside from paying off my monthly CC balance
• Electricity/Gas: ~$70 (depends on the season, spring and fall are in the low $40s while summer and winter can be in the high $90s)
• WiFi: $40 (recently signed up for the introductory offer at Comcast)
• Cellphone: $50 (I’m on the family plan still, but transfer this amount to my dad each month)
• Credit Card Fee: $8.33 ($200 annual fees across the 2 cards I currently have. Next year I will cancel/downgrade from the Chase Sapphire Preferred as the benefits for Travel and Dining are pretty much moot.)
• Subscriptions: Amazon Prime: $10 (annual subscription, I share with my family) Netflix: $0 (my parents cover this one) Hulu/Spotify: $11 Adobe Creative Cloud: $11 Apple Cloud: $1 OneDrive: $2 Causebox: $17 (quarterly subscription box that I pay the $200 annual cost for)
• Donations: I don’t have a recurring donation organization or amount, but will donate where and when I see the need. So far this year, I’ve donated $500 to my local hospital, the NAACP, and City Harvest.
• Savings Contribution: I will pretty much just transfer over money from my checking account to my savings account whenever it gets above the $1k or $1.5k threshold (I’ll keep more if it’s around the end of the month and monthly payments are coming up). I’m typically able to transfer over $2.5-3K each month, unless it happens to be one where quarterly property taxes are due.

Weekly Expenses:
Food + Drink: $78.70 (including tip)
Fun / Entertainment: $0
Home + Health: $72.33
Clothes + Beauty: $0
Transport: $0
Other: $189.24
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Day One (Monday)
8:45am: My alarm goes off and I hit snooze. One of the worst parts about the whole WFH situation has been how bad I’ve become with getting up on time, knowing that I can be at “work” in less than 15 steps. I scroll through social media a bit and catch up on some posts before getting out of bed.
9:15am: I’ve brushed my teeth, washed my face, and put on my skincare (toner, serums, and moisturizer) and am booting up my laptop. I changed jobs 6 months ago in the midst of the pandemic, leaving my previous role in financial services for a position in a large media/tech company, which has been a little crazy. It’s been tough doing everything remotely, and learning the new industry and programming/software has been especially difficult, but I feel like I’m getting my bearings. I start brewing some coffee.
9:30am: I hop on a Zoom for our weekly department huddle and listen as the different teams give updates on various initiatives as well as some background on company-wide kick offs and projects. Some of the projects I’m working on get brought up and it feels good to be doing what feels like actual work. After the call, I get to work on tackling work for some of the larger projects I have, which include scoping out source/logic details on a production report that we want to integrate in a new platform and QAing a table that I’m working on with data science.
12pm: I take a break to refill my coffee mug and make IG posts for my friends’ small business account and my own account (a food IG with 75K+ followers). I took on the first gig a few months ago when my friends, a couple in Brooklyn, launched their hand-crafted drinks business. I started the second, my personal account, over 3 years ago with a focus on restaurants in NYC. It stalled quite a bit over the last few months with the pandemic, but I’ve been dining out infrequently these days, and have limited myself to dining with only one friend at a time (out of a total of 3 friends since June, all of whom I know have tested negative and have been taking precautions since March).
3pm: I’ve wrapped up a touch base with a manager and a semi-stressful meeting where I had to present to some senior executives a dashboard we've been working on over the last few months. They have a few (mostly minor) tweaks that I note in a JIRA ticket before I grab my mask and take a quick break to stop by a local ice cream shop that’s invited me in to try their latest dessert special. There’s thankfully no one else there aside from one of the co-owners who recognizes me and gets my treats ready. I photograph them, thank her, and leave a $3 tip. $3
3:30pm: Back home, I get back to some Slack messages and try to prepare for another stressful call at 4:30pm that I have to lead. I finish eating the ice cream and call it lunch - but hey, that’s #adulting for you.
6pm: Wrap up some notes from the call and text my dad the address that I’m heading out to. I saw a 1BR condo listing pop up on Zillow over the weekend that looked promising, so I’m getting an in-person tour of it this evening. I get my mask on again and make the 5 minute walk to the building where the realtor is outside to meet me. We go inside to look at the condo for sale - the space definitely looks smaller in person than in the photos, and I note that a number of things need to be replaced or upgraded. I thank the realtor after the tour and give a call to my dad to let him know I’m okay and to give him my initial impressions of the space.
7pm: Back home! I wash my hands and change my clothes and get started on dinner; I’ve been craving soup these days so make a quick hot and sour soup on the stove with mushrooms, bamboo shoots, tofu, and some corn I have in the fridge. While I eat, I edit the photos from my DSLR from this afternoon, and check my IG account email to reply to about 7 emails that came in today about campaigns and invitations to restaurants; one of these includes signing a contract with a new app that’s offering a generous sign on payment and potential future income. I catch up on IG posts and comments and text a few friends.
11pm: I spend the rest of the evening catching up on some news, watching the latest episode of the Korean drama Start Up, and finally take a shower. While my hair is still drying in a hair tower, I do a quick Chloe Ting workout; I started doing some of her workouts a few months ago and while I’m not doing them super seriously, I’ve definitely noticed a difference in my abs and feel stronger overall. My Google Home plays some news snippets for me afterwards, and I roll my eyes at the continued attempts of our current president to try and derail the election results. On the plus side - the initial vaccine results from 2 firms have been super promising!
1am: I remember to take my daily multivitamins and then read a bit on my Kindle (I just finished Sex and Vanity, and start on Me Before You - another thing I picked up during quarantine, and I’ve already read over 30 books since March!). I then proceed to spend too much time on Instagram and reddit before turning out the lights.
Day One Total: $3
Day Two (Tuesday)
8:45am: Alarm goes off on the dot and I, the perpetual sleep procrastinator, snooze one too many times. I barely manage to make it out of bed in time to brush my teeth, wash my face, and chug some water before a 9:15am call. It’s a quick check in on projects within my business area so I summarize the work that’s been done and am grateful I don’t have to have my webcam on for this.
12pm: Unfortunately I need my webcam on for the next two meetings, so try to make myself look semi-presentable by combing through my hair and putting on a sweater, instead of my default hoodie. I get a little more clarification on some metrics and data sources in this upcoming platform integration and discussing my upcoming sprint priorities with my manager. At noon, I make a new post on my food IG and go through my feed. I pour my second mug of coffee and drink more water in preparation for the next batch of afternoon meetings.
3pm: Talk through more Zoom calls to the point that my throat is starting to hurt. I’m especially frustrated after the team huddle that just ended where one of the managers tells me my approach to building out the proposed data architecture is too limited in scope, and I should be more imaginative and proactive. The entire work from home situation has made it difficult to understand how to work with and collaborate with different people, so I try not to get too frustrated. I spend the rest of the afternoon making some minor adjustments to existing production reports and updating JIRA tickets.
5pm: I email over my dad a few of the more promising Zillow listings that landed in my inbox this morning. He jokingly complains that there’s too much to read and the words are too small before I realize that he’s been doing a lot of work on his laptop lately as he’s been WFH more. I take a look at a few computer monitors and opt for a larger (24”) version of what I currently have as it’s been working well for me for the last 6 months. I make sure it includes a HDMI cable and have it shipped my dad. $179.24
5:50pm: I grab my mask, bag, and camera and text my friend to let her know I’m en route to dinner; she’s one of the few friends I’ve seen in person since March and is also a food blogger with a separate full time job. She’s been quarantining in Long Island since the start of everything, and texts me that she’s driving in from her home, I head out to the PATH station, swipe in using my prepaid Smartlink card, and hop onto the next train.
6:35pm: I’m a few minutes late but make sure my friend knows I’m walking over, and meet her outside the restaurant. We get checked in, fill out our contact information on our phones, and get our temperatures taken; thankfully there’s only 2 other groups seated and the windows are open. Tonight’s dinner was an invitation that I already confirmed with the PR team, so the staff are expecting us and understand we’ll both be taking photos. We order a few apps and two mains, and spend the rest of the evening doing some quick photos and catching up on our lives, her plans to move into Manhattan or JC, and complaining about the ongoing election drama.
8:30pm: Dinner is done, and I realize I forgot to stop at an ATM and only have a dollar bill on me so ask if I can Venmo my friend my part of the gratuity. Thankfully she has $20 on her so I quickly Venmo her $10, making sure to use the adorable fries sticker to represent the copious amount that we ate tonight. $10
8:45pm: My friend and I walk out with our masks on, and I bid her goodbye and a happy Thanksgiving before stopping at the ATM to take out some cash, making sure to sanitize my hands after, and then head to my train. As I wait, I make some quick edits to the photos I took on my iPhone and add them with a few captions and tags to my IG stories; I manage to get through them all by the time the next train pulls up and leaves.
9:20pm: It’s always so nice to get back home! I wash my hands, change my clothes, and get started with transferring over the photos from my DSLR to my computer. I spend the next 20 or so minutes editing and saving the final versions in Adobe Lightroom and make sure to chug a glass of water to help balance out all the sodium I had. I check my messages and see that a restaurant in NJ confirmed a lunch delivery for tomorrow and see another contract in my inbox; I read the deliverables and ask the account manager if she can take out the clause requiring a Tiktok post because I don’t have an account.
11:30pm: I shower and put on my evening skincare, take my multivitamins, and do a quick ab workout with Chloe Ting (it still hurts lol). I take a look at my work calendar tomorrow and see that my first meeting starts at 9am, so I update my alarm to 15 minutes earlier. I take my vitamins and spend the rest of the evening catching up on some news, reddit, and IG.
1:30am: I blame Youtube vlogs for this one. Finally turn out the lights.
Day Two Total: $189.24
Day Three (Wednesday)
8:30am: Alarm goes off and I manage to get myself out of bed in a semi-reasonable fashion. Do my typical routine (brushing teeth, washing face, getting water and coffee ready) and log into my work laptop so I’m on the Zoom right at 9am. This is a belated overview session for one of the larger projects that I started working on quite late in the process, so it’s a useful business and data update that gives me a better understanding of the end goals.
12pm: Sit through one other department meeting where I don’t fully pay attention because I look into some minor report and code checks (oops). Once those wrap up, I’m able to take a break to do a post and stories for my friends’ business account and then make a post on my food account. I notice an email come in from a PR company about a new location opening for one of my favorite restaurants, so I check with one of my friends if he’s able to make the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and reply back to the email requesting it.
1:30pm: While I listen in on a company-wide speaker event on the topic of gender sensitivity and awareness, I also click through a recently assigned digital training course on sexual harassment and discrimination. I understand that the latter is a legally mandated item, but find it a bit sad (especially in the current day and age) that these are things that have to be spelled out for people. After I finish, I get a call for my lunch delivery; I grab my mask, keys, and wallet and meet the deliveryperson downstairs. I give him a $6 tip and take some photos of the items, which include chicken wings and a chicken sandwich. After I’m done with photos, I scarf down the food so I can make my next call which requires me to talk and have my webcam on. $6
4:30pm: I have a 1 on 1 with my manager and then a call with a business partner to scope out requirements for a new report. So glad to be done with calls! I get started putting together a project plan/roadmap for one of my projects and Slack one of the recently hired data engineers, who I found out grew up near me in suburban Philadelphia!
6pm: Get the shipping notification email that my dad’s monitor has shipped! I call it a day and close my work laptop and get started on my weekly apartment clean. I call my dad while I do so and let him know that his monitor should arrive on Friday; he thanks me and we catch up on work, COVID, and my potential future real estate investment. While I talk, I notice an alert from Mint that a large charge from Amazon hit my credit card; I’m a little worried until I log into my account and see that the annual prime membership has been renewed. Also tell my dad this as he heard me flip out thinking that someone had been making fraudulent charges on my card, as he and my mom are part of my “Prime household”. ($127, noted in my monthly expenses)
7pm: I’m done vacuuming and taking out the trash and am officially hungry. I make a quick tomato and egg soup with orzo and eat an apple while I wait for the orzo to cook. I wrap up some IG emails while I eat, including signing the updated contract with the Tiktok clause removed and politely declining some invitations to places that I’m not able to physically go to.
10pm: Wash the dishes, take a shower, brush my teeth and put on a clay face mask; while it dries, I do a quick 15 min workout on the mat and then wash off the clay mask before doing my skincare. I make sure to drink some more water and take my vitamins, and spend the rest of the evening in bed on my phone and working my way through Me Before You - it’s a slow start, but I’m starting to warm up to the protagonist.
1am: Lights out!
Day Three Total: $6
Day Four (Thursday)
8:30am: Forgot to change my weekday alarm back; oh well, I’ll survive. Crawl out of bed, and get ready for the day (you know the drill), and make sure I have plenty of coffee on hand. My period also just started, which is never a good sign.
12pm: The morning has just felt like an onslaught of meetings; followed by some impromptu Zoom calls. I’m starting to feel frazzled as various timelines and deliverables seem to have been shifted up and try to work with one of the other data engineers to specify possible business user requirements. This unintentionally gets shared with one of the project managers who sends an email en masse to the business users asking for sign off on this initial list. I don’t think it’s a big deal, but...
12:30pm: Make the post and stories on the small business account and my own account, finish the remainder of today’s coffee while I go through emails and minor JIRA tasks. I hop onto a share screen with one of my coworkers to transition over a project I’d been working on; I had built out a new dashboard and now that it’s “QA” state has been approved, he will now take over the more formal production process and maintenance.
3:30pm: During our second team stand up, I give my manager project updates and he immediately tells me I shouldn’t have let my list be shared with business users and other involved teams. I don’t fully get why; but after our team call he asks me to hop onto an impromptu Zoom with him where he tries to explain some of the complexities of company and team politics and how I should be very careful to give my stamp of approval, however formal or informal, unless I fully stand behind it. The conversation is a bit long, but I get a better sense of what's going on between teams and managers, and try not to cry as my manager tries to tell me it's not anything I did, but I need to be careful of my actions.
6pm: I manage to collect myself in time to meet a friend for the first time in months at an outdoor dine a few blocks away. He (and his girlfriend) was just recently re-tested as negative, which is always reassuring. While I get my belongings and my mask, my coworker Slacks me asking if I’m okay, apologizing for not messing earlier as she was on an afternoon call. She reassures me the same thing has happened to everyone else on the team, that a lot of these nuances I’m not aware of because I’ve never been in the office, and suggests putting on a one hour venting session with the other engineers in the team next week. I happily do so, and tell her I’ll catch up with her next week as I have off tomorrow.
6:30pm: My friend and I are seated near one of the heat lamps, and it’s so good to catch up with him after so long! He gives me some life updates, including the fact that he and his girlfriend are moving into a house they are waiting to close on, and the fact that he just put down a deposit for an engagement ring!! I’m so excited and barrage him with questions on timing, his plans, etc. and almost forget that we need to order food.
8pm: We have a delicious meal that includes burgers and a lobster roll (all of which I photograph) and he gets a few cocktails (I don’t drink). I leave a $10 tip, and my friend puts down $15 for his share, factoring in the alcohol. We mask up before heading out, and I tell him I want updates on everything for the next month as he goes through all those major life events! $10
8:30pm: After my short trip home, I wash my hands, change, and get started on editing photos from tonight. I definitely feel much better after the work “event” and take a longer shower tonight to decompress.
11pm: Decide to skip the workout tonight because I feel like it, and sit in bed doing some more administrative/scheduling tasks on my iPad in bed. I see a few updates from some of the team in India (yay international time zones - not) and debate if I should handle these tonight. Since I’m out tomorrow, I know it’ll be better if I do, so hop back onto the work laptop to wrap up some last minute code edits and JIRA updates. Once I’m done, I make sure my OOO notice and status in Slack are updated and eat a yogurt cup with some grapes because, yes, I’m hungry-ish again.
1am: Hair is dry, vitamins are taken, and it’s time for bed... or not? I’m already past the halfway point of Me Before You and cannot stop reading - it’s at the point where I’m now seriously invested in the relationship between the female and male protagonist and have to know how it ends (even though I already have my guesses). I speed through the rest of the book and shed a couple tears when I finish, which is past 3am. Thankfully I’m not working the next day! I make sure to set my alarm for later and finally go to bed.
Day Four Total: $10
Day Five (Friday)
11am: My alarm goes off and I actually feel semi-decent upon waking up - I don’t think I will ever not be a night owl! I get dressed and get ready to head out to try and get a COVID test; I last took one in June so want to have a more up-to-date status, especially as I’m potentially going home the next week for Thanksgiving. I haven’t seen my parents for over a year at this point and my dad has offered to drive down from Boston to pick me and my sister (in college, who is tested every week) up, but I’m still not feeling great about it given the fact that my parents are in their 60s. At the very least, I want to get a test to have more information before making any final decisions. I drink some water so I’m at least hydrated.
11:30am: I grab my Kindle, mask, and sanitizer and head out to the nearby mobile testing center that was set up. The line is about 15 people long - not terrible, especially as everyone is spacing out 6+ feet between each other - so I head to the end and spend the 2 hours or so in between my phone (making my daily IG post) and my Kindle (next up: Olive, Again) While I wait, I get an email about one of the campaigns I’ve been ironing out, and confirm I’m planning on visiting this weekend to get photos so I can send the content draft over for approval afterwards.
1:30pm: The process is pretty seamless; I fill out my information through my phone, upload a photo of my insurance card, and get my temperature and blood pressure taken before the nasal swab. It’s not that bad, I guess, but having anything put uncomfortably deep into your nasal passages is not fun. The doctor tells me I should get my results by the following Tuesday through the online patient portal; I thank him and head back out with my mask on.
2pm: Home and officially hungry, so after washing my hands and changing, I bowl a pot of water and put in a block of Shin Ramyun. I make it a little less like what I ate back in college by adding in some frozen corn, spinach, and an egg. I also eat an apple and catch up on some emails and go through IG before taking a fat nap.
6pm: I’m woken up by a text from my dad; it’s a picture of his new computer set up at home, and I’m glad to see everything’s working and should hopefully help his eyes. I take a second look at the photo and see that he’s using a tiny USB wire mouse - which he probably got as a work freebie. I sigh and find a wireless mouse on Amazon to have delivered to him the next day; I send him a text to watch out for that delivery as well tomorrow. $10
7pm: Time to head to the grocery store! I have a few options within walking distance of me, but like going to the Asian grocery store just given how unique and sometimes hard-to-find their selection is. I’m doing a virtual dinner swap with a friend tomorrow so I need to get ingredients for that, as well as my weekly grocery shop. I make sure I have my mask and reusable bag, and stock up on tofu, zucchini, mushrooms, bok choy, more apples (Fuji, but Honeycrisp is also a fav, ground pork, and some snacks, noodles, and yogurt. I struggle a bit to carry it home. #smallpeopleproblems $33.31
8pm: Once home, I unpack everything and get started on a (very butchered) version of soondubu with Napa cabbage, zucchini, and mushrooms with a spicy soup base (dwenjaeng paste, gochujang, soy sauce, gochugaru). I cook some rice on the side. While I eat, I load up Netflix and decide to start on The Queen’s Gambit.
11pm: Shower, skincare, and vitamins - and I end the evening with another quick mat workout. After I blow dry by hair, I climb into bed and spend far too much time on the phone as my brain wanders and gets in knots about Thanksgiving next week; my parents and I agreed not to make any decisions until I got my results back, but even if it’s negative, I know there’s still a risk if I were to let my dad pick me up and take me home. I know he and my mom really want to see me though, which makes me feel even more conflicted. I tell myself to stop thinking about it until next week and double check my schedule for tomorrow before opening up my Kindle to read.
2am: Finally decide to sleep after getting distracted by Youtube, again. Oops.
Day Five Total: $43.31
Day Six (Saturday)
10:40am: My weekly Saturday alarm goes off; my friends behind the small business and I have our recurring call every Saturday morning and while I would like to sleep in, I force myself to get up, brush my teeth, and do a quick face wash.
11am: I drink some water as we catch up on today’s agendas and tasks; we’re finalizing a seasonal holiday drink to be rolled out after Thanksgiving, so we go over the ingredients and timing, and figure out when I’ll be able to visit them in Brooklyn next month to get the photos for future posts and website updates. They also tell me they’d like to grab some photos of their new house (that they’ll be closing on soon) while I’m there, and I’m happy to do so. My friend tries to tell me that they’ll pay me extra for this, but I laugh and tell her she can just feed me.
12pm: Grab my mask, keys, and camera - Time to head out today! I have two stops near me to get photos for upcoming posts; one is for a bakery chain releasing a seasonal cake flavor and the other is for a newly opened location of a pizza franchise. My pick up order for the bakery was made in advance, so I stop inside, give them my name for the order, and after a little confusion that leads to them calling a manager, I have my cake ready to go. I take it outside to photograph; this campaign is offering a small payment but thankfully doesn’t need to review the content before I post.
12:30pm: I load up the app for the pizza place on my phone and use the pre-loaded credits to place my order in advance so it’ll be ready for pick up once I arrive. It’s a 15 minute walk or so over, but the pies are ready for me when I get there. The staff is nice enough to put them in a bag for me (they’re personal pies, so thankfully small enough) and I walk over to the waterfront to take some photos out there. I add some photos to my stories and walk home with my goodies; I’ll need to write up and submit the content for approval before posting, but this campaign is also offering a small payment.
1:30pm: Finally home! I wash up, transfer my photos to my laptop, and get started editing. In between, I make a post to my food account and the small business account, catch up on comments and friends’ posts, and try not to make a mess while eating some pizza and a slice of cake.
3:00pm: After putting the leftovers in the fridge, I’m ready for a nap. I set an alarm for 5pm just in case I oversleep since I need to make dinner late for my dinner swap!
5:00pm: Alarm goes off, and I struggle to get out of bed. I know I want as much time as possible to cook though, especially as bad things happen when I rush. I prep the food in advance by washing the bok choy, slicing the mushrooms, and mincing garlic and ginger. I do a bok choy and mushroom stir fry, and make mapo tofu and rice. I barely finish in time to package half of the meal into to-go containers for my friend, and text him; he tells me not to rush and that it’s cold enough so that the dessert won’t melt (lol).
6:40pm: I meet my friend outside halfway between our apartments outside of City Hall; of course we’re both masked. We do our meal swap; I give him the savory items I made while he hands over 2 small containers - and we both head to our separate homes. When I get back, I find out one has tiramisu and the other has a matcha oreo ice cream! I log onto Zoom for our virtual dinner hangout. Even though my friend is so close, he sees his parents regularly as well, so has been doing his best to be extra cautious. We’ve come up with this set up where we’ll each swap items for dinner (usually I’ll cook the savory and he’ll order dessert) and exchange them before enjoying dinner over Zoom later.
8:30pm: Call is over, so now it’s time to clean the kitchen - and it’s definitely a mess, especially as I was a bit frazzled. I wash the many utensils and pans I went through and do my best to dry them; washing up is definitely the least fun part of cooking.
11pm: Spend the rest of the night killing time between my phone, Netflix, and emails. I ask one of my friends (whom I saw earlier in the week) about some potential dates and places over the next few weeks, and send over calendar blocks while I wait to get reservations confirmed.
1am: By this point, I’ve showered, taken my vitamins, and am ready for bed. Read a little, watch some more videos, and eventually fall asleep sometime later.
Day Six Total: $0
Day Seven (Sunday)
12:30pm: It’s the one day this week that I don’t have an alarm, so I let myself sleep in for as long as I want to - which means that yes, I will sleep through the morning and into the afternoon. I dawdle in bed, posting on my food account and catching up on my feed, and just scrolling through various news articles and reddit threads.
1:30pm: After finally washing up and drinking some coffee, I grab my mask and bag to round out a few more groceries for the week; even though the Asian grocery store is great, they don’t have some staples so I’m heading to one of the more traditional stores near me today. I pick up some pasta, tomato sauce, oatmeal, peanut butter, and some more produce. $16.39
2:30pm: Once I’m back home and put everything away, I make a late lunch of oatmeal and apples with some Annie’s Mac & Cheese. While I eat, I start putting together the post and story captions, tags, and links for the pizza campaign, and submit them to the account managers for approval.
5:00pm: After some more dawdling on my phone and getting through more of The Queen’s Gambit (so good!), I hop onto a weekly Zoom with two of my good friends. We’ve known each other for over 8 years and while I do see one of them semi-regularly, the other has some health complications. We’ve kept this weekly Zoom call since mid-March and it helped me get through the rougher months.
7pm: After the call is over, I check my Amazon cart and take a look at anything that’s accumulated over the prior week. For non-essentials, I’ll add them to my cart and take a few days to think through if it’s something I really want/need and I’m usually able to pare down that list when I get back to it later. I decide to keep a saucepan and bath towels and order them for next week. $72.33
8pm: For dinner, I default to my tomato & egg soup with rice, and add in some zucchini for some more vegetables. I eat an apple and finish off the ice cream from yesterday as well.
11pm: Shower, do my skincare, and plop myself into bed. I continue binge-watching The Queen’s Gambit until the end - such a satisfying ending!
1am: Make sure my alarm is set for work before turning out the light.
Day Seven Total: $88.72

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html
Every year, tens of millions of Americans collectively lose billions of dollars to scam callers. Where does the other end of the line lead?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
Aniruddha Nath spent a week on the job at a call center when he realized that it was engaged in fraud. A lack of other opportunities can make such call centers an appealing enterprise.Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.