YouTuber Allegedly Hacks Into Scam Ring's Office CCTV, Gets Fraudsters Arrested [Video]

Five people in India were arrested after a YouTuber allegedly hacked into the CCTV cameras of the former's scam ring office and alerted the police about their work.

The YouTuber had also gathered evidence of fraud and handed it to local authorities.

On Sunday, the YouTube profile, named Scambaiter, shared a video titled: “I Got Scammers ARRESTED On Their CCTV Cameras!” The video, which showed how the group of scammers cheated people, went viral and garnered more than 1.3 million views. The 20-minute-long video showed CCTV footage taken from June 13-24.

The video begins with the alleged scammers at work, posing as Best Buy’s Geek Squad tech support employees. The CCTV footage ended with police in the northern state of Punjab entering the office and arresting the people inside, Rajneet Guru reported [Google Translate showed].

The office in the video shows two to five people at some point of time. They are seen making calls to people with their headsets on. The men in the video seem to be in their 20s or 30s.

“We don’t want you to get compromised or end up losing something on your identity,” a voice is heard of an alleged scammer calling potential victims. "That’s why, you know, your computer give us the alert so that you can call Microsoft people and get this thing fixed for you.”

“I need to go ahead and diagnose your computer network. You can leave the computer with me alone. I’m working on it, OK? It’ll take at least, you know, 30 to 40 minutes to diagnose your computer and see what’s going on. And I will give you a call back once I got the reports handy with me, sir.”

According to the narrator, the scammers call the victim to charge “a ridiculous amount of money” for implementing a fake “firewall.” Another person is assigned to call back the victim informing about the issue being fixed. They say a safety program for one year has been put in place. The total charge for the fraudulent service is said to be $339 “including all the taxes and everything.”

After collecting similar evidence, Scambaiter allegedly sent messages to several police stations in the Punjab area, informing them about the scam group. The police later hacked into the scammers’ computers and notified all of the victims of the fraud, Yahoo News reported.

On June 24, a group of police officers stormed into the building, shut down the electricity of the first and second floor and arrested five of the main scammers.

The video ended with a police report stating the charges against the scammers, which included cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property under Indian Penal Code Section 420 and Section 66C of punishment for identity theft and Section 66D of punishment for cheating by personation by using computer resource.