Man mails an AirTag to scammer to track their location without them knowing
Have you ever wanted to scam a scammer?
The urge might come over you when you pick up the millionth dodgy phone call, where a strange voice is demanding you send over some money.
Most of us just sigh and hang up, but not YouTuber @PleasantGreen, who's got 1.15m subscribers on the platform.
He's made a name for himself for exposing how scammers really work, and a fascinating video from last year looked into how they launder their money.
As an intro, he says: "I'm a guy that likes to call these scammers up and waste their time, and help other people understand how these scams work."
Advert
And that's exactly what he's done in this video - looking at a scam where you might get a fake email from a vendor like Amazon, telling you you've overpaid. You then call 'Amazon' (but really, the scammer), they remote into your computer, make you think you've been refunded too much money and need to send them cash.
Before you think this is impossibly obvious, the YouTuber says: "Yes, people do fall for this."
The scammers won't want you to send huge chunks of cash via bank transfer, but will instead get you to post cash to 'money mules' in the US, who will then deposit it into their Bitcoin wallets (while taking a cut for themselves).
To expose these money mules, the YouTuber posed as an unsuspecting customer, and got a friend to pretend to be playing him - setting up a money mule from another scammer.
The YouTuber says he wants to "give you a special insight into how these scammers work and how they coordinate their mules to pick up the cash and launder it to India".
He hides $18,000 in cash in the pages of a magazine - so the delivery company doesn't suspect anything is wrong and seize the package - then posts it to the money mule in Texas, with an Apple AirTag attached.
So far, so good. The package eventually arrives and is taken to the money mule's apartment. Then, it's protocol for the mule to send a video of them opening the package, and sending it to the original scammer - in this scenario, the YouTuber's friend. That's to show they got it all in one piece, and haven't taken any of the money.
When the video does arrive, it's shocking: the mule opens the magazine, and there's no money inside at all.
It doesn't take the YouTuber long to work out what's happened - it's pretty obvious the mule had already opened the package, taken out the money and then glued it back up again, all in a bid to scam the scammer.
There truly is "no honor among thieves" the YouTuber says - but the joke is really on the scammers, as the money was in fact, fake.
So, it all ends on a bit of a high for the YouTuber, who wraps up: "It kind of feels good to waste their time and their gas to show you how scammers launder their money."
The moral of the story? If anyone ever asks you to mail them cash, stop and think about what might really be going on.