FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
Oh, sweet revenge: White hat hacker floods scammers' phone lines
Mon, 26th Jun 2017
FYI, this story is more than a year old

What happens when you put cold call scammers up against a seasoned programmer? You get sweet revenge, if the case of one security developer is to be believed.

These particular scammers were trying to trick unwary users into thinking they owed money to the United States IRS.

A YouTube user by the name of Project Mayhem uploaded a video in which it shows how the hacker used VOIP to autodial every single one of the scammer's' phone lines 28 times per second, effectively jamming the lines.

"Hello. It has been detected that you are a scammer. Because of this we are now flooding your phone lines to prevent you from scamming additional people. This will not stop until you stop."

And the scammers didn't like it one bit. It took a while for them to catch on, but once multiple scammers in the same office started to get hit at the exact same time by the exact same automated message, suddenly it turned to chaos.

The video (NSFW) descends into swearing, rage and even one admitting that yes, he is proud to be a scammer.

New Zealand is still facing similar technical support incidents from scammers purporting to be from the IRD, Microsoft, Spark, Vodafone or any other major 'trusted' provider.

Australia is currently being pummelled by calls claiming to be from Telstra that are doing the exactly the same thing, according to Stay Smart Online.

The hacker is currently looking for donations to continue the revenge against scamming companies; whether it be tech scams, phone scams, credit scams, family member in trouble scams or loan scams.

Want to see what all the fuss is about? Check out Project Mayhem's video (caution: strong language):