Kitboga (streamer)
Kitboga is the internet alias of an American Twitch streamer and YouTuber whose content primarily focuses on scam baiting. As of April 2020, his channel has gained over 630,000 followers on Twitch and his YouTube channel has over one million subscribers.[1][2]
| Kitboga | |
|---|---|
| Personal information | |
| Nationality | American |
| Website | Kitboga.com |
| Twitch information | |
| Channel | |
| Years active | 2017 –present |
| Genre | Scambaiting |
| Followers | 731.8K followers |
| Total views | 20,123,757 |
| Follower and view counts updated as of July 28, 2020. | |
| YouTube information | |
|---|---|
| Channel | |
| Years active | 2017 –present |
| Genre | Scambaiting |
| Subscribers | 1.12 million (28 July 2020) |
| Total views | 147,303,235 (28 July 2020) |
Premise
Kitboga began baiting in mid-2017 after he found out that his grandmother was a victim of many types of scams designed to prey on the elderly, both online and in person.[3] He holds that, by wasting the time of scammers, he is preventing them from scamming others and is also providing a source of entertainment and education to his viewers. In doing so, he mixes elements of popular culture into his dialogue during scam calls.[4]
Scambaiting
In his videos, Kitboga engages in scambaiting several types of scammers, a majority of whom operate call centers in India. Besides technical support scammers, he also engages with refund scammers, IRS scammers, and others.
To misdirect scammers away from his real identity, as well as for viewer entertainment, Kitboga often acts as a number of characters during his videos, including an 80-year-old grandmother named Edna and a granny named Matilda,[5] a Russian man named Vicktor Viktoor,[6] a valley girl named Nevaeh,[7] or sometimes even a competing technical support scammer named Daniel. He does this by imitating the accent or vocal intonation of the character he is trying to portray, in addition to oftentimes using a voice changer to alter the pitch of his voice. However, the common factor uniting all these characters is that they are not computer-savvy, giving the scammer confidence that the would-be victim is more likely to fall for the ruse.[8][9]
Having received death threats amid other serious reactions after coming clean after a scam call, Kitboga maintains that it is essential to keep his identity a secret online.[9]
With the use of some hardware voice changer (Roland VT-3 and GoXLR) and different accents, Kitboga role-plays multiple characters, often related to each other.
See also
- Trojan.Clampi
- Jim Browning - online alias of an anonymous British grey-hat hacker and YouTube personality whose specialty is scambaiting
References
- "Twitch". Twitch. Retrieved 2020-02-09.
- "Kitboga". YouTube. Retrieved 2020-05-27.
- Lorenz, Taylor (2018-02-06). "This Twitch Streamer Is Avenging His Grandmother by Prank Calling Scam Artists". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2020-02-09.
- Rigg, Jamie (2018-07-30). "Making a living scamming the scammers". Engadget. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
- D'Anastasio, Cecilia. "This Twitch Streamer Gets Revenge On Tech Support Scammers". Kotaku. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
- Selk, Avi (2019-02-08). "Internet scammers are terrible. This troll is their nightmare". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
- Angry Tech Support Scammer VS Valley Girl, retrieved 2019-09-22
- Ward, Adam (2019-04-04). "Kitboga: The Internet star giving scammers a taste of their own medicine". www.ctvnews.ca. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
- Murdock, Jason (2018-05-22). ""From laughter to death threats": Meet Kitboga, the streamer exposing tech support scams". Newsweek. Retrieved 2019-09-22.