Browning and other scam baiters have attracted so much attention that even though many scammers seem to know their names, they also know they're scraping just the tip of the iceberg. Attracting millions of subscribers, they lure unsuspecting scammers in, waste their time, take their files and disrupt their operations. Over the past couple of years, a growing cohort of scam baiters have found success using YouTube and other video sites to share their exploits. Now the fraud has gotten so big that some people's righteous anger has boiled over into action. Read more: Gift card scams are growing, and retailers aren't doing much about it
The retailers he worked with were aware of gift card scams even back then, Roberts added, but it was small enough that "they mostly didn't really care." In exchange, the site would help people track, manage and swap the cards with other users. Back then, the company encouraged people to register their gift cards through his service.
"They don't really know who's holding onto these gift cards," said Mark Roberts, who helped co-found the startup Leverage in Southern California nearly two decades ago.
They're often embarrassed, and unlike identity theft, where there are strong consumer protections in place, there's almost no way to get their money back. The scope of gift card fraud, where scammers trick people into buying gift cards and handing over the numbers, is especially difficult to pin down because many victims don't report the crime. The lost money equates to an estimated $29.8 billion last year, a staggering jump from the $19.7 billion Truecaller estimated for 2019. The world of online scams has exploded in recent years - in April, a Harris Poll survey of 2,000 Americans commissioned by the app Truecaller found one in three people said they'd fallen victim to a phone scam, and more than half of them said it happened on more than one occasion.
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