This Fake Bitcoin ATM Scheme Has Wasted 4,000 Hours of Scammers' Time

A YouTube and Twitch streamer has trapped scammers for just shy of 4,000 hours in an impossible maze masquerading as a way to redeem Bitcoin from their victims.

While designed as a method of wasting their time, the pseudonymous Kitboga told Decrypt, it is also his most effective tool for obtaining information that can be used to punish malicious actors.

Kitboga’s team of 12 actively searches out scammers so they can pretend to be a vulnerable person on a phone call. This is done so they can waste the scammer’s time, create funny content, and collect details to stop the scheme.

Often, the calls would lead to the attacker demanding money to be sent via a Bitcoin ATM—so Kitboga created a fake Bitcoin ATM receipt that could never be redeemed.

“[Bitcoin ATMs are] a way that you could put cash in a machine and then it gets converted to crypto. So the scammers see that as a way to instantly take your money,” Kitboga told Decrypt. “They're expecting a receipt. So we went to a Bitcoin ATM, got the receipt, and Photoshopped it, and the QR code links to our fake exchange. The 1-800 number on the receipt is my 1-800 number. That’s sort of the entrance to this maze.”

Over more than a year, the fake Bitcoin ATM scheme has trapped approximately 500 scammers for a total of 164 days and 17 hours—or 3,953 hours. The average time a scammer spends in the infinite maze is just short of three hours, with the longest one person spent trying to redeem the non-existent Bitcoin being 156 hours, or six and a half days.

What happens inside the maze?

The site has a series of infuriating tasks that are tedious to complete, such as a CAPTCHA that asks for an estimate on how many nuts are in a bucket or how tall a wave is. Kitboga is currently hosting a challenge for fans to code CAPTCHAs that waste time, one of which asks the user to play the song "Sandstorm" by Darude on a keyboard.

Eventually, the scammer will be asked to input their Bitcoin wallet address, which doesn’t process correctly, and they are told to call the 1-800 hotline.

This is where the fun starts, Kitboga said. The scammer is forced to navigate through a confusing automated menu before entering the last four digits of their Bitcoin wallet—which the automated operator will always mishear. After failing a few times, the scammer will be told they’re being transferred to a human to help.

“We’ll just leave them on hold for like two hours, and no one ever comes to help them. Or we'll have recorded messages of a fax machine going off or someone answering with the call center in the background, but nobody can hear them,” Kitboga told Decrypt. “Imagine waiting on hold for two hours and then the person can't hear you.”

To make matters worse, while being on hold, the scammer must repeat ridiculous phrases every couple of minutes to prove that they’re still there. These phrases include “super smelly ghost,” “purple porcupine,” and “resourceful rattlesnake.” 

The hotline is intentionally taxing and demands attention, so Kitboga’s team knows the attacker can’t be scamming someone else while on hold. For that reason, the 3,953-hour total is somewhat conservative, as the team only records time wasted attentively on hold or attempting to solve a task on the site.

This is just a basic overview of the fake Bitcoin ATM scheme. Kitboga described it as an infinite maze with doors that his team can toggle on or off, depending on what they want to do with an attacker. Sometimes they’ll just want to waste a scammer’s time or create content, while others will be looking for very specific pieces of information and want to take things more seriously.

Kitboga told Decrypt that the infinite maze ranks as his second-most effective time-wasting tool, behind only AI bots that automatically call scammers, but it is the most effective tool for gathering intel. For example, during the Decrypt interview, Kitboga said a scammer was required to give access to their camera so the team could identify them.

“It's the most effective tool I have in collecting actionable, real information. They’re not going to give me their GPS location over the phone,” he explained. “When these scammers think they're this close to getting $30,000 or whatever—from a reputable crypto exchange—sometimes they'll give me their big wallet that they funnel all of the crypto through. That's a big mistake on their part, because now I can pass it off to law enforcement.”

The streamer claims to have helped freeze the funds of attackers, because they’re storing crypto on reputable exchanges. Kraken is partnered with Kitboga to share intelligence, and the exchange helps fund the scambaiter’s operations. 

Now, he’s expanding his options to waste the time of scammers. Kitboga’s team is currently developing similar infinite mazes for scammers asking for gift cards or for cash to be mailed to them.

Why do this?

Kitboga said he started trolling scammers more than eight years ago, after seeing a video of a Microsoft scammer getting angry at a pre-recorded old man who couldn’t hear properly—known as “Hello, This Is Lenny.”

It was the first time he’d heard of tech support scammers. He immediately thought of his grandparents, who had dementia and Alzheimer’s, and he believed they’d have fallen for it—especially considering they’d been scammed in the past.

“I know they would fall for the tech support scam, and I might be able to do something about it,” Kitboga told Decrypt. “If I spent 15 minutes on the phone with a scammer, that was 15 minutes they weren't talking to someone's grandma. That was my call to arms.”

At first, he simply called scammers and wasted their time on weekends as a “passion project.” When his friends wanted to watch, he began streaming the interactions so they could all laugh together. One day, a clip was shared on Reddit, and he started gaining an audience. This eventually led to him quitting his job as a software engineer to become a full-time scambaiter.

“I distinctly remember telling one of my friends that I worked with at the software job that it would only be a year,” Kitboga said of the pivot. “You know, it's like a one-year thing. Kind of you gotta shoot your shot. People think this is cool. Maybe I'll be able to educate, you know, a few thousand people about scams.”

Eight years later, he has 1.2 million Twitch followers, 3.74 million subscribers, and almost a billion views on YouTube. That’s a bit more than a few thousand people.

“It's been a really fun journey,” he finished.