Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Jim Browning" channel.

  1. If I've understood correctly, in most cases these scammers know that the local police is so corrupted that if the police comes knocking on the door, they just need to give some cash and continue with the operation. Unfortunately, there's very little that a foreign people can do for local issues such as corrupted police.
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  2. Unfortunately, it seems entirely possible that Kolkata police is simply corrupted and they get a cut from these scammers so the operation keeps going.
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  3. That's not possible because that's a web browser feature that's intented to inspect and debug web applications. The problem is that victims are giving control of their computers to unknown 3rd party. It really doesn't matter what the scammer does after that because they could modify all software without showing anything on the screen. The reason Jim can even record the attacks like this is because these scammers are nearly as bad with computers as the victims. The methods that Jim must be using to initialize the "reverse connection" require that the scammer is running an unsafe computer, too.
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  4. I depends on the jurisdiction you live in. I live in Finland and if I were doing the same thing as Jim, it would probably be sanctioned the same as the scammers because taking control of a computer system without a permission is considered such a big crime here. If the attackers can get their money via social engineering only then that would be considered much lesser crime compared to taking control of the scammer's computer. Other countries have different rules and it's pretty obvious that Turkey or India do not have similar legislation because otherwise local police would have no problems catching these scammers.
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  5. I think this is actually caused by a really poor UI in Youtube settings. 5:38 Shows the screenshot of the problematic UI. It first says that "currently connected channel will be deleted" and then follows the channel that's important to you with no explanation why it's displayed at this position. Had there been label "THIS IS THE CONTENT THAT WILL BE DELETED:" I'm pretty sure this whole incident wouldn't happened. The way the UI has been designed, it looks like you're going to move this content (170 videos and 3.3M subscribers) to another channel.
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  6. 12:20 The proper term is 2FA (2 factor authentication) or MFA (multi factor authentication). I wouldn't have guessed what "2-SA" means.
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  7. ​ @hawkeye5955  I'd also assume that scam centers like this one pay monhtly bribes to local police so the local police would actually defend the scam operation if needed.
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  8.  @scragar  The problem is that the scammers would only need to learn to press F8 first to stop any javascript from executing. Those developer tools need to be able to prevent the page from doing its normal work or developers cannot fix real problems on web pages. And the reason you need developer tools in all browsers is that the real problems are experienced with real browsers and need to be investigated using the same browser. In addition, it's important to notice that the problem is not the web browser but giving the control of the computer to the scammer. The scammers just use a web browser because it's simple enough for them and victims understand computers so badly that it is good enough. They could do much worse attacks when they get the control of the computer.
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  9. Exactly, with a native speaker that can actually use a computer (unlike these scammers which seem to be following a script without any understanding so their routine is messed up with page refresh) you could do a lot better scams. I think the only way to fix this for real is to start speaking about this kinds of scams in public and schools. That probably cannot help the elders we have but at least the issue would go away in long run.
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  10. It appears that these people will get higher pay if they don't ever hang up the phone call. As long as you're willing to keep talking they will keep the connection up. If they were to hang up, their bosses wouldn't pay them.
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  11. If you've granted control of the computer for the attacker for even a few seconds, the whole operating system needs to be reinstalled from scratch. It's exactly the same with computer viruses and other bad stuff. There's no safe way to clean the computer other than reinstalling the whole operating system again from known good media.
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  12. Some people seem to do that and pretend that they have trouble installing the remote desktop software when they are actually doing nothing. The scammers are basically playing tech support for imaginary computer user that has not enough clue to even install the remote desktop software. As a final twist this clueless user could be supposedly running Windows 3.11 + Netscape navigator.
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  13. I would use "accidentally" misfocused camera instead. It would be more believable for the scammer to actually see something but the image is so blurry + exposure is way off that the video is worth nothing. The video would still seem to match with the call.
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  14. 21:30 :D
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