We watched as an Australian got scammed. Trying to warn them was harder than you think (2024)

The scammer tells the victim that the money will be transferred into their account, but it will be in cryptocurrency.

On the scammer's screen, it looks like the victim has thousands of dollars invested in crypto.

"That money is fake," Jim Browning* quietly says, watching live as the scammer chats with the victim. "They will never see that money again."

It's late on a Tuesday evening. We have just logged onto a video call with Browning. He says certain scams are active at this hour.

Browning is dressed in a hoodie with a mask covering his face — "Jim Browning" isn't his real name.

His real identity is kept secret to protect him from the scam syndicates he exposes on his YouTube channel of 4 million subscribers.

Browning is a "scam-baiter". He monitors, undetected, scammers operating in real-time, then turns the tables on them.

"At some point, they've tried to run the scam on me, and I have reversed that scam," he says.

"When they have tried to connect to my computer, if you know what you're doing, it's possible to do that in reverse."

Once Browning gains access to the scammers' computers — sometimes with the help of an insider — he can see everything the scammers are doing, including how they interact with their victims all over the world.

Watching an Australian target in real-time

On the call, Browning is connected to a scammer's screen.

We watch as the scammer flicks between different victim profiles.

Tonight, the target is an Australian man.

From what Browning can see, the victim may have already lost thousands of dollars to the scam.

"Even though it looks like he's making money, it is completely fake," he says.

This particular group of scammers appear to be based in Georgia, in Eastern Europe.

They're posing as financial advisors who help people invest in crypto or organisations that recover lost or stolen money.

"In a particularly cruel scam, they target people who have already been scammed and pretend to be financial institutions that help the victims get their money back," Browning says.

"So they are re-scamming the victims."

That's what seems to be happening with their Australian target tonight.

The notes that the scammers have on him, and that Browning can now access, reveal the Australian previously lost thousands of dollars to another scam.

To trick him, they use an address from a supposed anti-money laundering association — this address we later found had been flagged as a scam in an alert from the Solicitors Regulation Authority in the UK.

The conversation between the scammer and the victim goes on for another few minutes. The scammer reassures the victim he will have money transferred into his account as crypto. The victim sounds convinced. They arrange to speak again a couple of days later.

Browning worries the scammer's next move will be swift.

"This one might be quite urgent," he says.

He suggests calling the Australian to warn him before he loses more money.

Losing billions to scams

This victim is not alone. Australians reported losing over $2.74 billion to scams last year.

It's less than the year before, but the combined total of scams reported to authorities increased by 18.5 per cent from 500,000 to 601,000.

Reports to the National Anti-Scam Centre — Scamwatch show scammers are targeting older Australians with retirement savings, who might be looking for investment opportunities, but Browning says anyone can fall victim to a scammer.

"They can be very convincing," he adds. "They're smart."

He tells us the Georgia operation he is monitoring got the details of their victims after the victims had entered them via fake online advertisem*nts.

"They'll see an ad somewhere that'll be for 'crypto AI' or 'AI-based investment', and they usually use fake celebrity endorsem*nts to do this," Browning says. "The likes of Elon Musk will appear there and this will entice people to spend a little bit of money."

Those details then go to several agencies that sell them to various scam groups, like the one in Georgia.

"There's a whole cottage industry trying to get people who are likely to fall for the scam."

Browning estimates that, at any one time, he can be monitoring around 10 different scam groups from all over the world.

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Last year, he worked with a scam insider and an Australian private investigator to expose a scam syndicate in the desert on the outskirts of Dubai. The scammer has told his story for the first time to Background Briefing, revealing the tricks and tactics used by the syndicate to lure victims with romance baiting, also known as Sha Zhu Pan or "pig butchering".

Just like in pig farming, there are three stages to scamming: firstly, the pig is caught, then it's taken care of so it fattens up, and then it's butchered.

Scammers target victims via text or dating sites, spend weeks gaining their trust, before they finally lure them into investing money in fake investment schemes, often cryptocurrency.

In the Dubai operation, the workers, mainly men, pretended to be a glamorous, rich woman from Ukraine, supposedly to gain sympathy from potential victims.

"Scammers really annoy me," Browning says.

"[My work's] not only about getting views on YouTube. It's also about helping the people that I can see being scammed here".

Warning: This is a scam

We decided to urgently reach out to the Australian target, to warn him about the crypto scam that's closing in on him.

We dial in. He picks up. Shocked, he first questions our intentions and asks how we knew who he had been talking to.

We explain our involvement and reveal how we've come to witness the exchange between him and the scammer.

But as the call goes on, he becomes suspicious — of us.

He wraps up the conversation, saying he's busy and can't talk any further.

He refuses to believe he's being scammed and doesn't want to speak with us again.

A day later, Jim Browning gets in touch with us. He's just spotted a new conversation between the Australian victim and the scammer.

Unexpectedly, the victim had gone back to the scammer to disclose that the ABC had warned him against the operation.

The scammer pushed back, arguing his business wasn't a scam, the ABC call was.

The victim seemed to believe him.

It's a turn of events that comes as no surprise to Jim Browning. Victims are often in trusted relationships with their scammers, he says, and that trust is hard to breach. He's speaking from experience.

"A lot of the time the scammers build up a rapport with their victims," Browning says. "I've seen scammers completely turn this around, even though I've warned the victim that the person you're speaking to is a scammer."

Too often, victims will accept they've been scammed only after their money is gone.

The ABC notified the Australian Federal Police about the incident.

'Anyone can fall victim'

In the years since Browning started monitoring and exposing scams on his YouTube channel, he says he has witnessed millions of dollars being lost, and seeing so many people being conned can get depressing.

"In other ways though, it's nice to be able to do something about it," he said.

"And honestly, getting one over on the scammer is a nice thing to do, and I think I'll always get a bit of a kick out of doing that."

Browning believes authorities and governments should have legislative powers to take direct action. In fact, he says he would love to see authorities "do what I'm doing" and be able to access suspected scammers' computers to monitor and try to expose scams.

He says he doesn't want "police to break into any random computer" but if authorities were able to do this legally, within limits, it would be an important tool that law enforcement should be able to use against scammers.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) have the ability to do this, subject to a warrant. They are able to get into a computer network and disrupt criminal enterprises. So the next question is, are they actually doing it, and could they be doing more?

We asked the AFP, which told us it does work with local and international law enforcement bodies to help with investigations, but that it won't comment on any potential activity.

In the May budget, the federal government committed $67.5 million, hoping to protect Australians from fraudsters and scammers.

The government has taken a number of measures including setting up the National Anti-Scam Centre, introducing the SMS registry, funding ASIC's scam website takedown service, and will soon legislate mandatory industry codes.

We also put Browning's comments to the assistant treasurer and the minister for financial services, Stephen Jones, but he did not respond by deadline.

"Anyone, including myself, can fall victim to a scam if the circ*mstances are right. It's never a good thing to say 'How on earth would you fall for something like that?'" he says.

In the short time we spent with Jim Browning, he watched two more scams unfolding live.

One scammer pretended to be a credit card company and informed an elderly woman in the UK that there had been fraudulent activity on her account. She shared personal details with them, which they could later use to scam her out of her money.

"At the end of the day, it's your mother, father, grandparents," Browning says. "Even if it means it disrupts that scam and a few less people are being scammed as a result, it's still worth doing."

*Name has been changed.

This storycomes from ABC'sBackground Briefing program.Follow the podcaston theABC listen app.