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The aim of scam-baiting is simple: waste as much of the scammer’s time as possible until they discover the game, or give up.
“I feel like if I’m on the phone to them for at least 30 minutes to an hour [then that’s] one or two fewer people getting tricked,” says Ms Chadevski, who has been on her scam mission for over a year.
The TikToker, with a 160,000-strong following, started taking on the scammers after a close family friend in her 60s had her entire bank account emptied via a phone scam.
“I was shocked because this person is very vigilant,” Ms Chadevski told The Sunday Age and Sun- Herald.
“Her mum’s still alive and she was warning her about all these scam calls, and the fact that she was the one to get victimised was shocking.”
“It just made me think, ‘how in-depth do these people go? How clever are they? What are they doing to trick people?’
Some of her most memorable calls were one scammer who asked her to moan on the phone to get out of an arrest warrant, and another who broke character when she asked how he felt about stealing for a living.
“He became genuine and expressed that the reason why he does this is because he has a bad housing situation and he thought that the second that people get scammed, the Australian banks will give them money back straight away,” she says. “So they’ve been told lies [by their employers] about how people can get their money back.
Ms Chadevski also notices the scamming trends and said at the moment…
