Internet scammers who target Americans caught on camera

US News

By Jerry Oppenheimer

It’s an all-too familiar experience: you get a call from a “customer service agent” with frightening news —  thousands of dollars in questionable charges have been linked to your account. 

The “agent” with a seemingly foreign accent and convincing details about your life — including part of your social security number, home address, and more — urges you to go to your bank, withdraw a fortune and deliver the funds to a nearby address or waiting car.

Either you next hand over tens of thousands of dollars and, eventually, realize you’ve been scammed — or wise up to the ruse and thank your lucky stars for the near miss.

But one YouTube content creator is taking a different tack: he poses as a vulnerable grandma before turning the tables on the scammers, taking over their computers then revealing their faces, locations and tactics to the world in a move being compared to a digital Robin Hood.

And he is delivering results against a crime spree targeting more and more Americans with hoax calls and fake emails, often from thousands of miles away and carried out by groups who think they are beyond the reach of the law.

The AARP warned last year that Americans over 60 were fleeced of $28.3 billion every year, with just one in ten of the scams reported to authorities.

It is not just seniors.

New York Magazine’s financial columnist Charlotte Cowles, 39, confessed last week that she handed over $50,000 in a shoebox to a stranger after scammers convinced her they were successively from Amazon, the Federal Trade Commission and the CIA and that she was both under suspicion of money laundering and in danger.

Giving them the cash would help save her, she believed. The scammers and her money are now long gone, leaving her, she wrote, in shock and embarrassment for allowing herself to be financially and emotionally scammed.

So little wonder that the “scambaiting” exploits of “Neld Harris,” which combine exposé and humor, have become a YouTube hit.

Neld is the pseudonym of the content creator behind the ScamSandwich YouTube channel. He is an apparently 30-something man who declined to share his real identity with The Post out of concerns about his safety.

He poses as Neld, an 80-year-old tech-illiterate widow from Dallas, who plays along with the elaborate scammers’ attempts to take over her computer, install malware and convince her to give them money.

The cover story is intentional: the AARP warns that elderly Americans, many living alone, are particularly vulnerable to scammers.

Neld’s popular YouTube channel, ScamSandwich, contains dozens of his scam-the-scammers videos that have had more than eight million views, and generated tens of thousands of subscribers since he went online in January 2023. One video last November went viral with more than one million views.

“I make surrealist phone calls to scammers to bait them into ridiculous situations using voice mods [voice altering software], fake banks, and fake gift card redeems.”

Either he finds the scammers by Googling phrases like “Zelle support” and calling their 1-800 numbers, or sometimes they contact Neld, thinking they are targeting a vulnerable grandma.

In Neld’s videos, he’s often asked by the scammers to go to a CVS or Walmart, and purchase gifts cards worth thousands of dollars, which he fakes doing, and sending. The gift card scam is a popular practice by the online thieves.

He’s often seen keeping the scammers – mostly computer-savvy Indian con artists in their 20s and 30s who work with detailed scripts — online for hours at a time, playing along with their scams, and driving them bananas as he responds slowly and stupidly to their demands. 

The scammers pretend to be American or Mexican with names such as Thomas Wayne and Brian Collins to match. They have to listen to his meandering, sometimes surreal, monologues.

“He’s worn down some to the point of tears, swearing they will give up their criminality and go straight, if he’d only leave them alone,” a Neld insider told The Post. 

“But that usually happens only after he’s actually hacked their computers and downloaded or destroyed all of their data by installing a very dangerous computer virus on the scammers’ computers, gained control of their webcams and live-streamed video of them to the world, embarrassing them publicly and threatening to contact their innocent families, revealing their criminal acts.

“He’s brilliant and has a truly dark sense of humor,” continued the source. “While he won’t discuss it, he does report some of his investigations to authorities in the U.S. and in India, in hopes authorities will make arrests.”

Often the table-turning exercise culminates in taking over the scammers’ webcams and “Neld” revealing that “she” knows precisely where they are working from, frequently in Indian cities, and sometimes in West African countries.

“Neld reveals” he can see their group chats, and even in one case a scammer sliding into a woman’s DMs, and shows them that he knows precisely where they are working from, before unleashing powerful viruses on their computers, ruining their ability to scam people.

Their responses include shock — and often torrents of invective, sometimes slipping into Hindi or Punjabi despite claiming to have been Americans with names like Brian Smith.

FBI efforts to target scammers overseas have borne some fruit, with one Indian mastermind currently serving 20 years in federal prison.

Hitesh Mabhubhai Patel, of Ahmedabad, India, operated and funded call centers running scamming operations that raked in tens of millions of dollars. 

He was jailed in 2020 after being extradited from Singapore to Dallas, Texas, where prosecutors said he ran a massive conspiracy which hoodwinked Americans into thinking they were talking to federal employees before handing over fortunes, with 24 people who were part of his scam also jailed in the US.