Shadowing Practice: Destroying a scam call center - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
B2
Right from when I started creating YouTube videos,
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Right from when I started creating YouTube videos,
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I've always wondered what scam call centres look like.
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But because it's difficult for me to get to Delhi,
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I've done the next best thing.
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I've got someone in Delhi to help me out.
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And that someone is Karl Rock.
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He's another YouTuber, and there'll be a good bit more about his channel later in this video.
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So between us, we've managed to expose yet another call centre.
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This one is called Renewed Technology of the Rohini District of New Delhi.
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And this video is going to describe how we managed to take this call centre completely out of action.
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Critical alert from Michael Shaw Like a lot of other scam call centres,
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Renewed Technology pays a third party to divert a phone number
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to their call centre at certain times of the day whenever they have people ready to man the phones.
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These are two examples of the pop-ups which were used by this call centre.
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There's a UK and a US version of it.
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And of course this sort of pop-up deliberately freezes your PC and is an audible warning to try and attract phone calls.
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And it doesn't matter who phones the number,
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they will get young or old in any profession, including nurses.
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Thank you for calling support,
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this side Mac, how may I help you?
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Yes, my computer's beeping.
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It says someone signed on to my computer.
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and it's a suspicious activity and I could get an infection from it.
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I'm really sorry to hear that, ma'am.
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Can I ask you what exactly you was doing when you got that kind of a message or an alert, ma'am?
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All I did was put in the American Heart Association.
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All I did was put in,
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typed in AmericanHeartAssociation.org to print my...
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I'm a nurse and I took a CPR class.
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These fake virus adverts typically reside on websites which are quite close to the real thing,
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but may be misspelled by a couple of letters.
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And now that he has the call,
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this scammer will attempt to get money out of his victim.
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When I phone with new technology,
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just like the nurse before me,
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they tried to convince me that it was a real virus and that I needed to pay something for new security.
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So most people who do fall for this sort of scam aren't even aware that they're a victim.
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I fast forwarded through the scam to the point where Steve Smith,
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whose real name is Mohamed Aftab,
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is trying to get me to pay for this software.
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He's typed in renowncomputer.com.
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There's a link in the description but I suspect this site won't be around for very much longer.
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Always upgrade the security anytime and we will be purchasing the security in front of you.
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whatever we will be going to do sir will be done
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in front of you only sir my key logger shows clearly
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that his password is anshu at zero zero this is not an insignificant password
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and i need to tell you sir like just need to let you know about it in today's time
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never use your any device without a security sir you can see we are what we are putting
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is an advanced identity protector sir let's ignore his waffle here for a second
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and look carefully at the delivery address the name is clearly
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himanchu nagam it will again come back without putting the security
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sir as it turns out himanchu nagam is the managing director
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of this company the real name is renewed technologies not renowned
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computer write it down my details on a piece it's a visa card
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or a master card
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which you'll use for the payment sir whilst i'm keeping him
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busy pretending to pay him i'm actually making a reverse connection to his pc
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and downloading some of his files some of the documents reveal
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that they have several different aliases renowned computers is one web info tech llc is another
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and some of their older checks showed that they used the name Tech Philosophers LLC.
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But most revealing of all was a password protected spreadsheet.
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In this spreadsheet I had the full details of all of their victims
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and just how much money renewed technologies had made in the last three months.
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Nearly $90,000.
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There were other tabs in this spreadsheet which clearly showed
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that they pretended to be QuickBook tech support and also aimed their pop-ups at UK people.
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But I still wanted to find out more about who these scammers were.
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I had the names of the managing directors but who were the people manning the phones?
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This is why it's always useful whenever a scammer logs onto their personal Facebook page.
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Here we have Mohamed Aftab looking at a Facebook page called Call Centre's Forum.
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These forum pages advertise legitimate business but also scams.
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When Aftab goes back to his personal page I can see exactly who it is that's logged in.
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And from that Facebook page it's possible to get a better look at the person who tried to scam me.
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This is what he looks like.
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And I was also able to find out the names of all of the other scammers.
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Praveen, Chander, Sonny, Manish, Sivan, Peter and Sahil.
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This spreadsheet shows that they are taking gift cards as payments as well.
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eBay, GameStop, Gateway, Xbox, Target amongst others.
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But I wanted to find out exactly where this call center was.
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When I looked at Zubacorp for Renewed Technology Private, it gave one address.
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But yet, when I looked at Google Maps for Re-owned Computer,
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it gave a completely different address.
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Close by, but still, I didn't know exactly where this was.
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So this is where I needed a bit of help from my friend Carl Rock.
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Carl is originally from New Zealand,
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but he now lives in Delhi,
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and he produces lots of videos on what it's like to live in India.
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Some of those videos include all about scammers and travel safety,
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but he also has a much more realistic view of the rest of India.
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I would really encourage you to have a look and subscribe to Carl's channel.
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Carl's channel will tell you about the real India and how much Indians actually hate the people who are running scams.
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Please take a look.
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So thanks to Carl and another one of my subscribers,
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I managed to get a number of pictures of this call centre.
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It sat above a solicitor's office in Rohini in Delhi.
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The agents only operated at night time because that was the US daytime.
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There was no obvious signage that this was indeed Renewed Technologies Private Limited,
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so Carl's wife asked the solicitors downstairs whether there was a call centre above them.
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She confirmed this.
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And I've linked to Carl's version of the video down below.
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He wasn't able to see into the offices because as you can see there's some blackout curtains.
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There was usually a window open and they seemed to be using it as an ashtray.
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The agents would use a door at the side of the premises whenever the US shift started.
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So I spent the next few days and weeks working out exactly how the scam centre operated.
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I observed how they bought pop-ups from various vendors.
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I saw them make outbound calls pretending to be Yahoo and Apple.
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I even watched them create one of their outbound robocalls.
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And if you're a patron of mine,
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you can see a much more detailed version of this video in your feed.
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So over those days, I created a one-page version of how that organisation fitted together.
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And this is what it looks like.
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We have a company called Renewed Technology in Delhi,
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which is owned by Himanshu Nagam,
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who's also the director of Dexter's Communication.
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Both of these companies buy VoIP services and pop-up services from various people around them in India.
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They make use of these services in order to scam people,
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mostly in the USA.
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When they do get victims in the USA,
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they will process the check payments through webinfotechllc.com.
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This is a company which is owned by Mahir Shah in the USA.
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The various call centre agents will use a number of company aliases to collect these payments,
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either Web Infotech, Webmasters or Tech Philosophers.
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Having multiple sites allows them to continue their business even if one gets shut down.
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All very clever.
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So now that I knew how the whole organisation worked,
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it was time to dismantle them,
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and I started with their phone numbers.
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What you're looking at here is the scammer managing their phone service.
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It's provided by a legitimate company called the real pbx.com,
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and they supply the US phone numbers which these scammers in India use.
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However, what I'm just about to do is flood those phone numbers.
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The call blasting software is supplied by scammerblaster.com
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and as the name suggests it's a very effective way of taking a phone number out of service.
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I've left a link to this in the description below.
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So I picked all of the numbers and over the next few days I consistently blasted these numbers with various floods.
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And you're probably wondering what it's like to be at the
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receiving end of one of these call floods we'll have a look at this.
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And don't forget that every one of these calls is not only costing these scammers some money,
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but it's tying up the phone lines so that real victims can't even get through.
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Win-win.
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I also did the right thing
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and reported these numbers to the rail pbx.com where they had most of their US phone numbers
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and ringcentral.com where they had some UK versions.
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When the call flooding started renewed technologies didn't know exactly what to do
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so they got in touch with their VoIP provider
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and I could see them having an online conversation with one of the agents.
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for some reason our scammer just doesn't know how to explain
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that he's getting bombarded by these calls our scammer tries to explain
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that there's lots of these prank calls and the helpful agent suggests
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that perhaps the phone number was submitted to the wrong campaign the scammer explains
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that they're not customers or even people but they're actually songs playing
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and the big advantage with scam blasting is that they're random numbers every single phone call
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so there's no way that they can just ban a single number.
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That won't stop it.
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The ever helpful agent suggests that a way around this is to get the customer to press a button.
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So this will reduce the number of calls reaching agents but they will still be charged for every single call.
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But they still can't quite work out why they're getting all these calls.
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Everything was okay until that day and the agent again suggests that someone is trying to hamper their business.
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They say they haven't shared these numbers with anyone so they're still confused as to why they're getting the calls.
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Finally, they suggest that they need to replace the two numbers that they've been given.
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So, to my absolute delight,
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they ordered two new phone numbers,
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and guess what my next move was.
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But call flooding was only
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part of the way to bring down this call centre.
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I noticed that they also used Authorize.net for their payments.
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And the payments were substantial,
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over $500,000 in the space of nearly 3 years.
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So I wrote to Authorize.net and provided them some audio and video of the scams in action,
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but I couldn't rely on this alone.
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Most victims of this scam won't even know that they're a victim,
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so I decided to write to every one of the people that I'd found on their customer list.
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In the email I pointed out to each victim
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that it was a scam and how they should go about getting their money back.
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They should approach their bank or credit card company and ask for a refund.
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I also confronted the owners of Renewed Technology and Web Infotech LLC. Can you refund them?
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Yeah.
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Okay, and have you started doing that?
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We started making, like I said,
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we started making the calls.
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If they ask for a refund, we will refund.
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No, no, no, no, no,
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no, no, not if they ask for it.
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So you've taken money off them under fraudulent circumstances.
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you don't need to have the excuse
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that they didn't ask for their money back you should be
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just giving it no no no we we are not giving it back because
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if they want the support to continue we are supporting ridiculous
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they were scammed into getting services from your company you should
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return this I told you my side of the story you are free to do whatever
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so you actually want to keep their money yeah
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if they will ask us for a refund we will refund them okay that's yours that's fine you stick with
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that then and we'll see what happens thank you okay thank you bye
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and next i go after him i confront him with all
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of the evidence before he finally admits what he's going to do next
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okay okay so ronnie would like to tell you i've already shut it down everything is shut it down
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and what else you want to know? well I would like to know are you really going to shut down
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or do we have to keep flooding those numbers the blaster does it need to keep going?
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no no no I only do the genuine work so you're gonna stop scamming are you?
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You're not doing anything wrong.
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Okay.
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So all of the people that you've taken money from via your various company names,
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renowned computers and web info tech and tech philosophers,
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you're going to shut all that operation down.
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Yeah.
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Yes.
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You're going to.
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Okay.
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Are you really going to shut them down?
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Yes.
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Yes.
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well okay so when does that happen
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we already wrapped up everything
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if you got this much information then you must have aware about
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that we started calling to our customers who are not happy
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and we have already told the customers
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that we are going to refund the many and all everything
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and of course i didn't believe one word he said to me
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but what was clear was that he was really going to shut down the operation
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I observed as I started to delete all of the files,
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not only on the local PCs,
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but on the servers that they used to store important information.
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So, with a bit of perseverance,
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we've finally managed to get one call centre shut down, if only temporarily.
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Lastly, if you enjoy watching videos about getting one over on scammers,
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please consider becoming a patron of mine.
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You'll get early access to videos or,
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like in this case, access to a more detailed video which gives more information on this call centre.
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The link is on screen now,
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patreon.com slash Jim Browning and also I'm on Twitter at JimBrowning11.
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Thanks again for watching. so
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, you will practice English speaking skills through a captivating real-life scenario involving the exposure of a scam call center. By listening to and imitating the dialogue from the video, you'll improve your pronunciation, intonation, and overall fluency. This engaging content not only helps you grasp the language but also makes you aware of common scams, enhancing your listening comprehension and critical thinking. Regular practice in this context can immensely benefit your IELTS speaking practice and prepare you for real-world conversations.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Scam call center: A business that deceives people over the phone to obtain money or personal information.
- Pop-up: A type of window that appears suddenly on a computer screen, often used by scammers.
- Computer security: Measures taken to protect a computer system from threats, including viruses.
- Malware: Malicious software designed to harm or exploit computer systems.
- Victim: A person who has been deceived or harmed by a scam.
- Alert: A notification indicating a potential issue or threat.
- Identity protector: Software or services that safeguard personal information from theft.
- Suspicious activity: Any unusual behavior that raises concern about security.
Practice Tips
To effectively use the shadowing technique while practicing with this video, follow these steps:
- Listen carefully: Play the video and focus on the speaker's pronunciation and rhythm. Take note of their tone, especially during critical moments of the dialogue.
- Start slow: Begin by playing sections of the video at a reduced speed. This will help you understand the nuances of each phrase without overwhelming yourself.
- Repeat and imitate: Pause the video frequently to repeat phrases or sentences out loud. Try to match the speaker's tone and pace to enhance your spoken skills.
- Use a shadowing app: Consider utilizing a dedicated shadowing app to rehearse your speech. These apps can help you track your progress and offer feedback.
- Engage with the content: After shadowing, discuss the video's content with a friend or tutor. This practice not only reinforces what you've learned but also builds your confidence in speaking.
By integrating these techniques on a reputable shadowing site, you’ll develop your English skills while staying informed about potential online threats. Happy learning!
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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