LA-based voice actor Rosie Okumura has been scamming the scammers for the past two years and has no intention of stopping anytime soon.
The 35-year-old does what’s known as 'scambaiting' three to four times a week.
She gets millions of views for her sometimes hilarious conversations with scammers and often enlists Siri on her phone as a useful accomplice as she draws them into long and frustrating conversations.
LA-based voice actor and scambaiter Rosie Okumura. Photo: Supplied/Rosie Okumura
Okumura tells Jim Mora she first got into scambaiting after her mother fell into the trap of a scam when she got a pop up on her computer saying she had a virus.
"So my sister and I kind of had to put out a few fires for her but the last step was asking for the number she called and I called them and I wasted the guy's time for an hour and a half.
"And I went on a Facebook livestream, and it was just hysterical having people's responses in the chat and having an audience, and after that I was like you know what, this is fun, I could do this all day."
There are other scambaiters out there who also broadcast what they do online and go further by gaining access to the scammers' computers or hunting them down.
But Okumura says her route is different - she's not trying to ruin their life or put them in jail, just waste their time and raise awareness.
"I'm not too tech savvy when it comes to hacking into people's computers so I just sort of stick to the comedy stuff and it's sort of harmless fun, but all I want to do is waste their time and then sort of use those videos to educate people on what to look out for at the end of the day.
"I also take my safety very seriously."
Some involved don't even know it's a scam call centre because their job is just to transfer or make outgoing calls and leave messages, she says.
"I've actually befriended a couple of people that I've spoken on the phone to that are no longer scammers but have shared inside info with me.
"People do crazy things in times of desperation and I try to have a little bit of sympathy, I can always tell if I'm dealing with someone who is a really nasty person, I have no sympathy for those people."
Her phone calls can last anywhere from five minutes and all the way up to two hours, she says.
"It kind of depends on how many people I get on the line, what character I play, what the scam is, how desperate they are, but yeah it can be an hour to two hours."
She admits sometimes she'll go to some silly lengths just to keep their hopes up for nothing. One time she strung along a scammer for three weeks who believed she was an old lady that was going to help him financially.
"He ended up confessing that he was working on a scam centre but he has now shifted the scam into him being a sad and desperate and needing help, when I'm very sure he still works at same call centre because I hear his phones going off in the background and his other scam buddies in the background.
"So, he really thinks he's taking me for a ride when it's the complete opposite.
"I once had a scammer I found on craigslist with a fake listing for a dream house in Santa Monica for way too good of a price.
"It turned out the house was very close to where I lived at the time so I went to the house, took pictures from the outside and photoshopped in moving pods, to make the scammer think I went through all the motions and I moved out of my house to make them feel really guilty."
The advice from authorities is to report these calls if you've fallen victim already, but there is also advice on what to look out for here.
Okumura says she likes to take the preventative approach to ensure people don't fall for it.
"No matter what we do, there's no way we're going to catch them all, it's not Pokémon."
Scammers are getting smarter though, she says, and probably targeting millennials, rather than the elderly as is the stereotype, purporting to be Amazon to gain access to their account or spoofing legitimate-looking phone numbers.
"They sort of feed on desperation so that gets really scary too because we've all been there in a place where we're desperate, or thinking differently or just in a different headspace, and they really know how to prey upon that and it's scary."
Sometimes they'll call hundreds of people, hoping one of them took part in a sweepstake or raffle and scam them into slowly revealing more personal information, she says.
"When you're kind of blinded by the opportunity and the excitement, you're not really looking around as closely, especially if it's something you're expecting.
"They just prey on fears and the things that we want the most, it's really evil at the end of the day."
Okumura has nearly a million subscribers to her YouTube channel, and she says a few times a day she gets message from people who say they've helped stop someone from falling victim to a scam.
"So, it's not just me, it's other people also doing similar work after having seen my videos and that makes me feel really good."
