[00:00:04] Pierogi: How many people do you have working at Microsoft.
[00:00:07] Scammer: A lot, we cannot, we cannot even count.
Ma’am, if you look on the top there will be help.
[00:00:12] Pierogi: Yes.
[00:00:13] Scammer: H-e-l-p – help.
[00:00:14] Pierogi: What’s your website?
[00:00:15] Scammer: microsoft.com
[00:00:17] Pierogi: Oh, you don’t work for Microsoft.
Come on, now sweetie.
[00:00:20] Pierogi: You’re doing a short scam?
[00:00:21] Scammer: It’s a short scan.
[00:00:23] Pierogi: Yeah, short scam.
[00:00:24] Scammer: Its a scan, short scam.
[00:00:25] Pierogi: Yes.
No, a scan.
[00:00:32] Scammer: Oh I was.
How about you have all of your files gone for trying to steal money from an old person?
[00:00:49] Scammer: I don’t want to take any money from you.
[00:00:51] Pierogi: Yes you do.
And your files are gone.
[00:00:55] Scammer: How do you know that?
Do you hear me?
[00:01:07] Bob: Welcome back to another season of The Perfect Scam.
I’m your host, Bob Sullivan.
To kick things off, we have a very special guest.
He calls himself Pierogi, and he’s a hero on the internet to everyone except professional scammers.
Well, he’s a hero even to some of them.
Pierogi is a scam baiter.
He takes call the rest of us shouldn’t even answer.
Millions of people watch these films.
Single videos get as many as 5 million views.
[00:03:06] Bob: So this is personal.
[00:03:53] Pierogi: Yeah, so this scam is, I call it the grandma scam.
So they say, “Hey,” um, you know, “Is this X-Y-Z?”
And then my grandmother said, “Yes.”
And they said, “Well your grandson is in trouble.
It’s really, really sad.
He adopted the pseudo name, Pierogi.
[00:05:11] Pierogi: My wife is Eastern European.
She introduced me to a number of different foods, one of them being pierogis.
So, all the different flavors, I love them.
[00:05:57] Bob: They might be the perfect food, I have to say.
A big fan of pierogis.
[00:06:00] Pierogi: Not for my waistline though.
[00:06:02] Bob: There is a lot of online criminals.
It’s a very big universe, so Pierogi usually focuses on one kind of crime.
[00:06:37] Bob: So he takes the phone calls and engages with the criminals.
And for his stunts, he employs a whole cast of characters.
[00:06:45] Pierogi: Sometimes I just call as myself.
And it’s really funny, because I even say I’m Pierogi.
Some of them know me, and they watch the channel and sometimes I talk like this.
So I have one, so my Vivian Rogers is my grandmother, and she can be really raspy.
So this is my other grandpa voice that I have.
So I do that one.
You remind me of my dad.”
So then you have that kind of father/son dynamic.
As you’re free to hear, he focus-groups the characters to ensure they’re effective.
Vivian is one of the more critical characters.
CLIP:
[00:09:30] Scammer: Where are you right now?
[00:09:32] Pierogi: I’m at the mall right now.
I’m about to get in the car to go home.
[00:09:41] One car ride later.
[00:09:43] Scammer: So your gear is locked then.
Tell me what you want to do.
[00:09:46] Pierogi: My computer’s locked?
No it’s not.
[00:09:49] Scammer: Yes.
[00:09:52] Pierogi: No it’s not.
[00:09:54] Scammer: It’s locked.
[00:09:55] Pierogi: My computers not locked.
[00:09:58] Scammer: It’s locked.
you gotta put the password and check.
[00:10:02] Pierogi: Are you sure?
[00:10:03] Scammer: Yes, I am 100% sure.
Now put your password…
[00:10:08] Pierogi: My password?
[00:10:09] Scammer:…in your system.
[00:10:09] Pierogi: It says incorrect.
[00:10:13] Scammer: Hmm, your password is changed.
[00:10:17] Pierogi: What?
[00:10:18] Scammer: (chuckles)
[00:10:19] Pierogi: What did you do?
[00:10:20] Scammer: You were trying to make a fool of me!
[00:10:22] Pierogi: What did you do?
[00:10:24] Scammer: I changed the password.
[00:10:26] Pierogi: What?
[00:10:26] Scammer: Now tell me, what would you do?
[00:10:28] Pierogi: What?
[00:10:33] Pierogi: How about you go on your rig.
How about you go on your box and see that I deleted all the files on your box.
[00:10:40] Scammer: You cannot do that.
You do not have access to my computer.
[00:10:47] Scammer: Are you kidding me?
[00:10:48] Pierogi: No.
[00:10:50] Scammer: Who are you?
[00:10:51] Pierogi: Who are you to be trying to scam out of a bunch of money?
[00:10:55] Scammer: Who are you?
[00:10:56] Pierogi: I’m a grandmother.
[00:10:57] Scammer: So what are you trying to do with me?
How does that feel to have zero files on your C drive?
(crickets)
[00:11:18] Pierogi: You really need to get a different job, son.
I’m just telling you because what you’re doing is very criminal.
So why did Pierogi pick the name Vivian, and where does she get those kind of motherly instincts?
So my mom and her mom.
And I took a lot of different nuances from kind of how they would react to somebody like this.
Vivian is my grandmother.
[00:12:37] Bob: How does Pierogi pull off all those voices?
Sometimes with the help of technology.
There’s software and there’s hardware.
I actually use a hardware equipment.
“And I can make myself sound like I’m 81 years old.”
[00:13:15] Bob: That altered voices are just part of Pierogi’s game plan.
And really, they’re just a distraction.
Sometimes they don’t understand that they are, but they do.
And they really freak out which is, is nice.
But the cool thing is, we’re doing all this live.
So this isn’t even an investigation that’s taking six months.
And then all of a sudden, they hang up ‘cause they know they’ve been had, so.
[00:14:54] Pierogi: Honey, hey.
[00:14:55] Scammer: Its got a lot of (inaudible).
Okay, you’re scaring me, yo.
Can I hey have my money back?
So I was like, I gotta learn Russian now.
So and to kind of be, become a part of their family.
[00:17:18] Bob: It’s an insult.
[00:17:19] Pierogi: Yeah, insult.
[00:17:21] Bob: Let’s stop right here and make something very clear.
I know you’ve heard this before, but I really, really mean it.
Don’t try this at home.
I know we’re lionizing Pierogi a bit here.
Don’t try this at home.
Even Pierogi will tell you that bad things can happen.
[00:17:49] Pierogi: You’re dealing with online criminals.
So, if you mess with them, you know, that’s my warning.
I would not, I would not mess with them.
I would stay away from them.
Just hang up the phone on them.
[00:18:24] Bob: We don’t want to encourage people to freelance this.
Um, describe for me a couple of bad things that could happen.
Let’s say somebody listens to this and they say, I want to be Pierogi.
Next time a scammer calls me, I’m going to give them the business.
What’s the bad things that could happen to them?
Everything is searchable on the internet, so they can take your phone.
So there are a lot of risks.
He’s another scam baiter turned YouTube sensation.
Perhaps you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Pierogi and Jim Browning even know each other.
They just make all the money from it.
So that’s, that’s what we’re doing.
[00:20:40] Bob: Uh, is there any change it was Jim Browning you were talking to?
[00:20:43] Pierogi: Yeah, it was Jim.
[00:20:47] Pierogi: Oh, nice.
Yeah, Jim’s great.
I wish he was in the States.
Want… he just wants to expose these guys as well and help as many people.
What are the most common crimes?
And they were giving legitimate support.
And we could do the support for cheaper.
So that’s really where it’s a kind of evolved in this tech support space.
Don’t call that number.
So it’s just a complete scam.
[00:22:58] Bob: And yet, these scams, these stories really are compelling.
We know vulnerable consumers are victimized constantly by these criminals.
Why are these scams so effective I asked Pierogi.
He sees one particular variation often.
So it’s a crazy process and it goes really, really fast.
[00:24:20] Bob: And it’s a whirlwind of emotion for him, too.
There is a lot of human suffering behind all these crimes.
How do we do stuff like that?
How do we expose the bosses that are overseas?
You’re ruining what we’re doing."
So I think it’s making a really big impact.
[00:25:49] Bob: It is making a big impact.
So big that sometimes he’s able to stop crimes in progress.
What are you doing here?"
But believe it or not, sometimes they help him out and tell on rival scam gangs.
So…
[00:27:37] Bob: Are you telling me there’s no honor among thieves?
The enemy of an enemy is, is my friend, right.
And it’s full of surprises.
So they really get stuck in these jobs, and they can’t leave.
So it’s really, really sad.
But the, the actual scammers themselves make about 10% of whatever they steal from somebody.
It’s not a real job.
And you’re scaring them to some degree.
Do you get the sense that any of them you know quit that day after talking to you?
I think there’s, we have one video where it says, would you help a scammer?
And actually the guy’s become my friend now.
And he started to break down crying.
And he said, “Sir, I can’t do this.
This is a lie.
This whole thing.”
This was literally within a couple of minutes of talking to me.
And he said, “I can’t do this anymore.
I don’t want to do this.
This is a scam.
I’ll, I’ll let you see my computer.
I’ll show you how everything’s going.
I, I just, I can’t do this.
I thought this was a legit job.
I needed money, and then I realized it was a sca–, a scam.
I can’t do it.”
He was, his parents weren’t there for his wedding.
He’d just married.
He’s kind of like a little brother to me.
And I was like, hey, also here’s a few hundred dollars more.
Go take your wife out to dinner.
So, that was one of the most incredible moments of my life.
It’s hard not to wonder, does he ever get scared?
It’s been really, really neat to what Scammer Payback uh, has meant to me.
In fact, there are times that he strings along individual scammers for many months.
[00:35:53] Pierogi: It is.
So we take them on wild trips.
Yeah, just continued on and on.
I could call on him, he would pick up.
Scammer Payback is incredibly popular.
Did you ever think you’d have that many people watching your work?
[00:37:44] Pierogi: I don’t know.
She’s just like, all right, go do it.
So I started waking up at 4 in the morning and calling these guys before I worked.
And then I would call these guys after I worked.
One video is almost at 20 million views.
And so let me say thank you for all of the people who admire that.
[00:39:05] Pierogi: Some days yes, some days no.
(chuckle) And that’s what, I don’t know, it doesn’t necessarily scare me.
All these crypto get-rich-quick schemes and things like that.
[00:40:21] Bob: Here’s a really important insight Pierogi shared with me about online criminals.
They often already know a whole lot about you.
And that can make their story sound much more believable.
They can find a bunch of different things.
And he’s like, “Well, Ma’am, we’ve got all of your information.”
So…
[00:41:42] Bob: That’s really persuasive it seems to me though.
[00:41:45] Pierogi: It is.
Tell us how much is in your bank account."
That’s, that’s one of the nuances that they do.
They’re like, “Yeah, we’ve got it here in the system.”
So they, they know even more than just what you could google quickly, right.
[00:43:14] Pierogi: Correct.
“We can get a bunch of sales every single day if you have good information.”
So these scammers are getting better information on people.
And it’s really, really sad.
[00:44:55] Pierogi: Correct.
It’s really sad.
[00:46:11] Bob: You know, I really like that suggestion.
It’s very straightforward, but I’ve not heard it before.
But it’s kind of like a scam buddy, or it’s a, almost an accountability partner.
I got this weird email, what does this look like?
What do you think?
These guys called me, left a voicemail.
I’m not going to jail, am I?"
And that’s what they tell people.
That’s the other part.
That’s a huge red flag.
I’ll say, “Oh hey, I should just tell my husband about this.”
I’m going to lose my job."
So keep your guard up.
Don’t buy gift cards.
[00:49:10] Bob: Don’t buy gift cards.
Yes, that’s a great way to end this conversation.
And more often than not, that ending really is send me money via gift cards.
Don’t buy gift cards to make payments to anyone ever.
They’re for gifts, and only the people you know and love.
Call the AARP Fraud Watch web connection Helpline at 877-908-3360.
Their trained fraud specialists can provide you with free support and guidance on what to do next.
Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
For AARP’s The Perfect Scam, I’m Bob Sullivan.
