To catch a scammer: Kraken builds fake crypto account to ‘bait’ fraudsters

A call-center scammer impersonating President Joe Biden attempted to steal what they thought was $450,000 worth of Bitcoin from a streamer — instead, chaos ensued.

United States crypto exchange Kraken has provided a novel method for flagging nefarious wallets — building a fake crypto account on the exchange to “scam bait” bad actors.

Tweeting on May 10, popular streamer Kitboga — whose content revolves around annoying scammers— revealed that Kraken had built him a “custom environment” that he used to frustrate a scammer impersonating President Joe Biden. Kitbot had previously had a run-in with the fraudster around a year ago.

This was so much fun!

— Nick Percoco (@c7five) May 10, 2023

In the accompanying video clip, Kitboga can be seen with around $450,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC) in his Kraken-built fake crypto account.

The scammer then sees the funds via video remote computer screen-sharing software that he supposedly duped Kitboga’s character into downloading, and gets very excited about a big potential payday.

However, the punchline comes when Kitboga, who is portraying an elderly woman in the video, incorrectly enters the scammer’s wallet address before sending over all of the funds. As a result, the scammer becomes highly infuriated and starts berating Kitboga with a slew of swear words.

Notably, the scammer appears to have supplied a Kraken-hosted BTC wallet address, which essentially enables the crypto exchange to identify them and flag their activity.

All this seems to have been made possible by a collaboration between Kitboga and Kraken’s chief security officer, Nick Percoco.

best crypto marketing i’ve seen on tiktok yet.

Kraken sponsored a huge scam baiter account. They built him a custom environment so he could fuck with scammers pic.twitter.com/86p6FLA4g6

— Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) May 10, 2023

Kitboga has 1.2 million followers on Twitch and 3 million followers on YouTube. His content generally revolves around comedically wasting the time of call center scammers by playing a bunch of non-tech-savvy characters.

In some cases, he has also managed to get their dubious websites taken down by reporting the fraud to the hosting companies these websites are stored with.

“Everyday there are scammers taking advantage of people. I call them to waste their time, walk people through their ‘script’ and lies, report info when I can, and otherwise make light of a dark situation,” his YouTube profile reads.

Cointelegraph has reached out to Kitboga for comment. 

In a video on May 1, Kitboga highlighted a new BTC-related “social security scam” that targets victims via email or text message claiming that strange purchases have been made with their bank accounts.

Related: April’s crypto scams, exploits and hacks lead to $103M lost — CertiK

However, when victims call the numbers provided, the scammers claim that their identities have been stolen and that they need to withdraw all their cash, buy BTC and send the funds to a “secure government wallet.”

Kitboga obviously had fun with these scammers by pretending to get their “grandson” to buy 10,000 BTC and send it to the wrong address.

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