“Daniel, can you run through the case for me one more time please?”
I looked across the desk at my new assistant. He was exhausted, I could tell. His brain was frazzled from repeating every tiny detail so many times.
He took a sip of water and prepared to do it again, just once more.
“The target is Liam, he was twenty three years old at the time of his disappearance six years ago. He lived with his parents, Brenda and Steve and was a single father to Macy, four years old at the time. He was a responsible young guy and an outdoorsy person who often took his daughter to the local woods.”
“Good.” I replied. “What happened to him on March 6th?”
“He’d spent a day in the woods whilst Macy was having a rare overnight visit with her mother. He didn’t get to hike alone often and took whatever opportunities he could.
“He returned to the home that evening, agitated. His parents said he wouldn’t calm down and kept repeating that something was following him. His behaviour was erratic and paranoid.”
Daniel took another sip of his water and rifled through the mounds of paperwork on the desk to jog his memory of the timeline before continuing. He was doing well, but I enjoyed watching him sweat.
“His parents managed to calm him enough to get him to sit and eat dinner. There was no one surrounding the house or in their garden, despite searching.
“Still unsettled, he told Brenda at 9pm that he was going for a walk to clear his head. She thought it may help and didn’t stop him. When Liam didn’t return by 11pm Brenda began to panic.
“She tried to call her son but his phone was switched off, which was very unusual. She didn’t know what to do. Her and Steve drove around the local area but couldn’t find Liam anywhere. He didn’t return home and was reported missing the next morning.”
“Has there been any evidence since?”
“Nothing. Not a single sighting either, which is odd for a case like this. But there are numerous theories, most relating to a photograph that Liam took and posted online only hours before he returned to the home.”
I picked up a photograph that stuck out amongst the local news clippings and documents I’d managed to acquire from police, rescue forces and PI’s.
It was one I’d spent hours looking at.
It showed Liam, a handsome young guy beaming at the camera, trees around him and his face reflecting the happiness he felt within nature. I’d started to feel like I knew the missing boys face better than even his mother did, having studied it so intensely.
It would’ve been fairly innocuous, if it weren’t for the shadowed figure just visible in the background.
Humanoid in shape, the figure appeared to be standing behind a tree, watching Liam as he walked through the forest. It’s features were clear; eyes, a nose and a smile, all engulfed by darkness. Every time I looked at it I felt a chill of fear and excitement.
The case had gained very little traction; police had mostly written Liam off as a runaway. They kept up a cursory investigation but explained away his erratic behaviour with drugs, despite everyone close to him insisting that it was completely out of character.
Most professionals involved had disregarded the photograph as an optical illusion.
Not all were so eager to declare the mystery solved. Difficult to find Internet forums discussed the photograph regularly, coming up with a colourful array of theories.
Did Liam run away and stage the picture? Was he kidnapped by some sort of Bigfoot? Did he stumble on something he shouldn’t have in the woods and paid for it on his later walk?
Some even speculated that his ex, Janie, killed him to gain custody of their daughter. This was a theory that was fiercely denied by both Janie and Liam’s family. The couple maintained a good co-parenting relationship and the arrangements for Macy were agreed.
His mother contacted me when police officially closed the case after seven years of following useless leads and tips from conspiracy theorists. Macy had started to ask about her dad, to question what happened. Brenda couldn’t bear the not knowing.
“I got your number from a friend at a support group I attend. She said you’re the best.”
That’s all Brenda said to me when she called.
She couldn’t pay. Usually my services are very expensive but Liam’s case intrigued me, so I took her on pro Bono.
It was Daniels first case, and my first working alongside someone else. It was unusual, to have someone in the office who wasn’t crying, or lamenting me for not being able to resurrect the dead.
It was going to take a while to adjust but after the incident in the bar with Olive I was grateful not to be alone. I hoped I’d made the right decision, Daniel’s online credentials were shining as he reeled off the case in perfect detail.
If it worked out I would have so much more time to work out who was trying to stop me getting to the truth.
I thought of Valerie. The hour that I waited for her in the park to turn up and how cold the bars were on that swing. We were sixteen, confused and in love, her disappearance broke my heart.
I couldn’t be more desperate to follow the lead but I had to be smart. I needed Daniel to acclimate before I trusted him to help me with something so important.
I had to see how he’d cope when faced with a monster.
In Liam’s case, everything pointed to him having been taken against his will by the entity in the trees. I’d had the photograph studied by experts in editing, all of them said it was untouched.
That was rare. I’d never before had a piece of evidence so compelling. I ran the risk every time of unearthing another human monster and another human tragedy. Or finding someone like Kai, who didn’t want to be found.
Not this time.
“Tomorrow we’re travelling to the woods and we’re going to retrace Liam’s steps. Are you ok with that Daniel?”
He looked nervous. Daniel was young, inexperienced and sceptical of almost everything I’d told him, regardless, he showed promise.
I’d tried to be upfront and whilst I was grateful that he hadn’t left immediately exclaiming my insanity, I was concerned that he was woefully underprepared.
I’d met him online two years ago, where he’d obsessively categorised missing persons cases, sparing no detail. His reservations were natural.
It’s a hard pill to swallow, finding out that monsters are responsible for a huge number of unresolved disappearances.
Daniel thought that I was making some kind of sick joke, that it was an initiation.
He nodded and we parted ways, him carting a huge folder out of the office to study the case overnight. I’d tasked him with mapping the route and helping us find the spot that Liam took the photo. I wanted to really test him.
I pulled up an hour or so before sunrise outside his small flat, just above a shop.
He’d dressed ridiculously, in a shirt and blazer. I held my tongue, making a conscious effort to come across nicer.
“Morning Amelia!” He beamed, feigning a cool exterior. He couldn’t hide the sweat on his brow or the small tremor in his hands. Not from me.
“Are you ready?”
“I am. Last night I did some research into the local area and the woods Liam went missing in. Did you know there are eight people who disappeared in those woods in the last decade alone?”
“I didn’t know that. Good work. I think we could be dealing with something very dangerous... I have to ask, Daniel... Why the suit?”
I just couldn’t stop myself.
“I’m working. These are my work clothes.”
I laughed a little and touched the accelerator with my woodland walking boots, feeling a little smug as Daniel whimpered a meek protest.
“You’ve not done any field work in your research have you.” I smiled to myself, revelling a little in his fear.
“I find my skills are on a computer. I can dig up dirt, hunt anyone down via their digital footprint and put together a comprehensive file. But no... I’ve never taken it out of my bedroom.”
“Do you know why I offered you this job Daniel?”
“Because I’m thorough. I’m useful.”
“No. That’s not it.”
I smiled again as I took a hand off the wheel and reached across him to the glove compartment, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and lighting one as I wound my window down slightly.
Online sleuths were ten a penny but there weren’t many with the skills that Daniel had, I’d chosen him for a reason.
“I hired you because I traced you back to the email address I received the anonymous files from. I haven’t come across many internet detectives with the balls to hack a secure police system.”
Daniel grinned, it was a victory he needed to help subside his nerves.
“Like I said Amelia, my skills are online. I saw some old posts of yours about this case on the forums and I thought I’d give you a hand. We’d been talking for some time and I really wanted this job.”
I felt my whole body cringe. I did need a hand. The files he sent we’re regarding the case that kept me awake every night for over a decade. The only one I’d been unable to solve.
Valerie.
I didn’t want to burst Daniels bubble by telling him I’d already seen those files and that they were of no use to my investigation. It was his drive and ability that I was interested in. I let him have his victory.
“Tell me if I’m overstepping but I didn’t realise that you... knew her.” Daniel continued, plugging the silence that had followed his admission.
“You are overstepping.” I hissed back. “We aren’t discussing Valerie today. Who is the target?”
“The target is Liam-“
“The target is Liam.” I asserted with finality, tossing the end of my cigarette out of the window. I wasn’t ready to let him in, not yet.
We continued towards a small village silently, an antiquated sign marking our turning off the busy stretch of road and into meandering hills and valleys.
Abelfort
I stopped the car abruptly in a small, deserted car park on the edge of the woods.
“Where did he enter?” I asked.
The woods weren’t especially large, not in comparison to the vast national parks of America. For England, however, it was more than just a small smattering of trees. Certainly enough to be classified a forest.
Choosing the correct entrance point was vital to covering similar ground to Liam.
“He lived over that way.” Daniel clutched a piece of paper and pointed to his left, dawn just breaking in full over the tree line. “So he will have gone in through something the locals call the cross tree.”
He pulled another scrunched piece of paper from his pocket and I despaired a little as I noticed his formal shoes. They looked expensive. He unscrewed a photo of two trees that had intertwined about two metres up, creating a perfect natural archway.
It wasn’t hard to find.
There was something about the way the trees danced with each other in the morning light that made it look more eerie than peaceful. Like two lovers in a violent, passionate embrace.
“There’s no need for work clothes in this job, you know?” I joked, trying to make conversation and squash the earlier tension as I held my copy of Liam’s selfie up to various different trees.
“I’m learning that now. There was no induction pack.”
I scoffed. I supposed I wasn’t such a traditional employer. When should I have broken it to him that we were extra busy during holidays?
The forest terrain was treacherous. Even through my boots I could feel the protruding tree roots and uneven surfaces. Daniel was struggling, shivering a little under the canopy that blocked out the freshly risen sun. We walked for hours.
I wasn’t sure what exactly to look for, I couldn’t liken the monster in the photograph to anything else I’d dealt with, leaving us in unfamiliar territory.
Finally, after starting to feel hopeless, I noticed something.
I faced Daniel and held my finger to my lips, stopping him in the clearing we’d reached.
The sounds that accompanied the trees had stopped, there was no birdsong, no tree branches moving in the wind, not even the sound insects rustling in the leaf litter. Instead there was a feint hum, surrounding the area and vibrating from every direction. It was low pitched and hypnotic.
Daniel started to shake as he noticed the low, rhythmic tones. I felt my own heart start to pound a little.
Whatever was near was doing a great job of trying to insight panic. I wondered if that hum was what Liam heard, alone, following him through the trees as he made his way home.
That would fuck with anybody.
“Come on! You didn’t hide very well the first time, why are you hiding now? We’re here for Liam!” I shouted into the open space.
I was angry. Angry that something would be so blatant and yet so cowardly. It was trying to use us as playthings.
“Who said that was the first time.”
The hum came to a grinding halt as the creature spoke and its words echoed directly through me.
“Come out. Face me.”
I noticed that Daniel had dropped his map and his whole screwed up pile of printed documents. The internet wasn’t going to help him now and he knew it. I was confident I could keep him safe... for the most part.
The leg came first. The burnt looking, shadowed leg that lengthened and contracted as it moved, like a slinky making its way down a steep set of stairs. The body followed. Unlike anything I’d seen before the monster moved like the laws of physics didn’t apply.
It wasn’t typical of the monsters I was used to facing. Many of them resembled humans, or at least things that humans might recognise. This, however, was something entirely new.
For a moment, I felt exactly what Liam must have felt. The panic, the terror, the desperation to flee and go home. It wasn’t a good feeling.
As it stabilised, fully in our view it morphed into the human-like shape I’d grown so familiar with when studying the photograph.
It’s extremities resembled the branches and roots of the trees around it. It’s eyes formed in the space between the shadows, glowing a yellow that just stood out amongst the winding branches.
And that grotesque, sinister smile.
Not all monsters were so unpalatable, but I could feel the hatred coming from inside this one. Like it’s sole purpose was misery.
“What happened to Liam.” I quivered desperately.
“Which one was he.”
Without the forest to obscure it the monster voice echoed with each word, like a second, and third, and fourth voice all lived inside it. A mocking laugh following every letter.
“The one you couldn’t resist so bad that you let him take a picture of you.” I held up the photograph, inching slightly closer.
”mmmmmm.... hahahahahah.”
I took my eyes off the monster long enough to recover from the profound effect that his evil smile was having on me. I turned to Daniel, scanning his torn and muddied clothing as I noticed a damp, dark patch on his posh suit trousers.
I hadn’t intended to scare him so badly. I hadn’t expected to be scared so badly myself.
“Is he alive?” I shouted.
”Of course not. He tasted so good. How do you think you taste... Amelia?”
I felt my face sink. I tried to control it but I couldn’t.
“How do you know my name?” I demanded, shaken.
”Your reputation precedes you. There are so many out there who would consider me a hero for removing you from this world.”
I took a step back, piecing together the parts that didn’t make sense. A monster like this wouldn’t reveal itself. It just wouldn’t.
This was a trap. Just like Olive.
“Who hired you?” I screamed, my hands clammy and sweat forming on my neck. I tried to hold my composure.
”There’s plenty of candidates aren’t there. Your work, your life, your involvement with that pretty, young girl... What was her name? How did she taste Amelia?”
I swallowed a lump in my throat. The sickening voice spoke with such knowing of my intimate personal tragedies.
He knew way too much. And we’d found him far too easily.
“Who are you working with? How do you have these details?”
*”I bet you’d love to know the answer to that. You still didn’t answer my question though. What do you think you taste like?”
I snarled. I wasn’t going to get anything from him and I knew it. Distressed, it took me a few moments to notice the creature extending a long, branch-like arm towards my new assistant.
“Daniel move!” I screamed, watching in horror as he leapt backwards, stumbling in his muddied shoes and tripping to the ground.
I ran towards the monster, fumbling in my pocket for the knife I’d used to sever my connection with the sirens. One that had got me out of many scrapes. The creature noticed the small blade in my hand and it’s smile extended, past the perimeter of its face.
”They said you had weapons... Your weapons won’t be effective against them. You have no idea what’s coming.”
I plunged the knife, deep into the shadowed mass as it stood and waited, laughing, accepting its fate. It was apparent the entity was nothing more than another message, a living warning on a suicide mission.
That terrified me even more.
As the knife made contact the creature started to disappear, fading into blackened particles. I didn’t like to kill anything, that was never my aim, but no one deserved to die like Liam did either.
One by one the particles faded into nothingness, leaving behind a lighter atmosphere. As the last of the creature was obliterated the colours in the forest grew brighter and the sharp tweet of a bird broke the silence.
“What the fuck was that!” Daniel’s voice bought clarity to the area as he hoisted himself up from the floor. The creature was gone. I clung hard to my blade.
Clarence, a good contact working closely with monsters, hadn’t explained to me how it worked or what it was made of when he’d given it to me. He said it was a secret of the organisation he worked for and if they found out I had one he’d lose his job.
I’d tried to turn him down at first, insisting I’d rather die than kill, but I’ll be damned if it hadn’t come in good use more than a few times.
“I meant...” Daniel continued, breaking my stream of thought.
“I know what you meant and I told you when I hired you, open mind. You need to adjust to the things you’re going to see. Now get us back to the car, please.”
We stumbled through the trees and out of the woods. Daniel was embarrassed, he tried to hide the wet patch in his trousers but he knew I’d seen.
“It’s ok to be scared you know.”
“You weren’t. I don’t want to be scared anymore Amelia, this was awful... and the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. I’m ready for our next target.”
“Me too... But first we have to inform Brenda that her son won’t be coming home and that her granddaughter no longer has a daddy.”
I shed a tear for Liam as we loaded the car and got back on the road. I had nothing to give his mother, no evidence of life or death and not a single real answer.
Daniel was wrong too. I was scared.
Monsters and the people that work with them are responsible for so much damage. And I know all about it. There was a chance that these warnings lead to Valerie, and an even bigger chance that I was being trapped.
Whoever was after me already knew the answers to my cases and they’d reached the monster first. They were able to make such a terrifying creature willing to die for their cause.
This wasn’t just about stopping me finding Valerie. Someone wanted me dead.
TCC
case 3

NYT article on scammers.

Not really about Kitboga. The author talks to Jim Browning. Very interesting. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html
[Edit: adding the text of the article which was sent to me by a friend from a call center]
Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Image Murlidhar Sharma, a senior police official, whose team raided two call centers in Kolkata in October 2019 based on a complaint from Microsoft. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
Image The Garden Reach area in Kolkata. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
Image Aniruddha Nath spent a week on the job at a call center when he realized that it was engaged in fraud. A lack of other opportunities can make such call centers an appealing enterprise. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.

I know this will get downvoted, but... why do you insist on using email authentication?

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

Fascinating piece published today by NY Times Magazine on scammer call centers in India. The reporter even tracks one scammer down, travels to India and confronts him. Link and article below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

Every year, tens of millions of Americans collectively lose billions of dollars to scam callers. Where does the other end of the line lead?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.

A list of every Unus Annus video name

I made a list of every Unus Annus video name. Posting this here because someone wanted to see it and a comment doesn't allow more than 1000 characters.

November 15th - Unus Annus
(note- The Very Start.)

November 15th - Cooking with Sex Toys
(note- 365 Days Left)

November 16th - Purging Our Sins with a Net Pot

November 17th - Hot Dog'd to Death

November 18th - Making Our Own Sensory Deprivation Tank

November 19th - The Good Kind of Cupping

November 20th - The Bad Kind of Cupping

November 21st - The Worst Kind of Cupping

November 22nd - Ethan Will Be Kicked in the Balls

November 23rd - Doing Each Other's Makeup in the Dark

November 24th - Baby Hands Operation

November 25th - Mark and Ethan Summon a Ghost

November 26th - 2 Truths and 1 Lie -- Waxing Edition

November 27th - Poopsie Sparkly Critters (a slime surpise...)

November 28th - Play-Doh Thanksgiving

November 29th - Helium Therapy

November 30th - Drawing Memes From Memory

December 1st - 1 Man 100 Accents

December 2nd - An A.I. Predicts How We're Going to Die

December 3rd - Mark Turns Ethan into a Mummy to Prepare Him for the Great Beyond

December 4th - The Cubby Gummy Challenge

December 5th - We Buy a Professional Hypnosis Video and React To It

December 6th - Mark and Ethan Attempt and Escape Room

December 7th - Ethan Destroys Mark's Van with a Bat

December 8th - There's Still Hope...

December 9th - Ethan Gives Mark a Viking Funeral

December 10th - The Great Meat Mistake

December 11th - Acupuncture Is NOT Painful

December 12th - Floating in a Real Sensory Deprivation Tank

December 13th - Mark Reviews The Impossible Burger But There's a Looming Sense of Impending Doom
(note- Paintball gun)

December 14th - We Made Nude Pictures of Eachother

December 15th - You made Beautiful Music for The Barrel... But Only One Could Win

December 16th - We Had To Drink Each Other's Pee
(note- The first of the Pee Trilogy)

December 17th - Ethan Explores Mark's Haunted Basement

December 18th - Giving Away Our 1,000,000 Subscriber Gold Play Button

December 19th - Ethan's Relaxing and Totally Normal Naul Salon

December 20th - Taped and Afraid

December 21st - What Was The Most Painful Thing We've Ever Endured?

December 22nd - Donating Toys to charity w/ JackSepticEye

December 23rd - Harnessing Our Dogs' Unlimited Energy

December 24th - Santa's Mukbang (Drinking 1 Gallon of Eggnog)

December 25th - Forcibly Turning Mark Into Santa Claus Against His Will

December 26th - Preserving Ourselves In Wax
(note- JackSepticEye was also here!)

December 27th - Beating Inanimate Objects to Death

December 28th - Emotional Pain vs Physical Pain... Which is worse?

December 29th - Duct Tape Crusifixion (Amy, Please Don't Watch This Video)

December 30th - You Blink You Lose

December 31th - 2 Grown Men Attempt the Presidential Fitness Test

January 1st - We Took The Polar Plunge

Janurary 2nd - Hiding Out Sins from Amy's Holy Peepers

January 3rd - We Eat Bugs

January 4th - DIY Bungee Jump (Please don't try this)
(note- Disclamer Song Origin)

January 5th - We Have The BEST Thumbnails on Youtube and No One Can Tell Us Otherwise

January 6th - Who Can Make Themselves Taller?

January 7th - The Sensory Overload Tank

January 8th - Recreating Ourselves as a Cursed Mannequin

January 9th - We Took an IQ Test

January 10th - Ethan Fianlly Becomes a MAN

January 11th - Mark and Ethan Go Casket Shopping

January 12th - We Take a Lie Detector Test to Uncover Our Darkest Sins

January 13th - Learning to Breathe Underwater

January 14th - Fixing Mark's Hole with Ramen but Every Time We Add Glue We Get 5% Closer to God
(note- The hole made in the video where Mark punched a hole in the wall)

January 15th - Mark Steals Ethan's Face

January 16th - You Breathe You Die

January 17th - 2 Absolute Beginners Experience the Dancing Glory that is Salsa

January 18th - DIY Geriatric Simulator

January 19th - This Is How We'll Die...

January 20th - We Cryogenically Freeze Ourselves

January 21st - This is What Being Tased Feels Like

January 22nd - What Happens When A Youtube Channel Dies?

January 23rd - Bad Bad Beans

January 24th - We hired a Real Hypnotherapist to Analyze Our Darkest Dreams

January 25th - We Turned Our Bodies Into Art
(note- painting each other naked)

January 26th - Mark and Ethan Lean About The Human Body

January 27th - Mark Punishes Ethan

January 28th - Strange (and legal) Things You Can Do With Your Body After Death

January 29th - DIY Cheese

January 30th - Hacking The Very Fabric of the Universe

January 31st - Looking at Long Lost Memes

February 1st - Discovering the Secret to Eternal Life

February 2nd - Turning Mark Into an E-Boy

February 3rd - Ethan Redefines Male Beauty

February 4th - Professional Fire Cupping (Going Even Further Beyond)

February 5th - An Extremely Sour, Not-at-all Sour Meal

February 6th - Literally Eating Fire

February 7th - Unregulated Axe Throwing

February 8th - Literally Laying On Broken Glass

February 9th - Making an Indoor Tornado to Flex on Mother Nature

February 10th - Nutball: The Most Dangerous Game
(note- First of the Nutball Trilogy)

February 11th - Becoming a Master of Mime

February 12th - Discussing the Idea of Murdering Each Other bit It's Just a Joke and Definitely Not Serious Haha

February 13th - Are We Already Dead?

February 14th - Our Perfect (and last) Valentine's Day

February 15th - Drunk College Party Simulator

February 16th - 10 Strange Amazon Paroducts Ethan Bought Mark Because He Doesn't Know How To Spend Money Responsibly

February 17th - Chickens Teach Us About Life and Death

February 18th - 3 Big Boys Attempt the Kings Royal Fitness Test

February 19th - Being Attacked by a Fully Trained Bodyguard Dog

February 20th - Learning the Ancient Art of Chinese Archery

February 21st - The Ultimate Trolley Problem

February 22nd - Goat Yoga

February 23rd - Edible Slime was a Mistake

February 24th - Granting Acces Into Heaven's Sweet Gates

February 25th - Long Hair, Do We Dare?
(note- With Marks Quarintine Hair, yes, he did dare)

February 26th - We Wrote a Hit Pop Song in 30 Minutes

February 27th - Mark and Ethan go on a "Drum Date"

February 28th - Blowing Our Souls Into Some Hot Glass

February 29th - Top 10 Worst Things Your Friend Could Possibly Spend Their Money On

March 1st - Nutball Extreme: Taser Edition
(note- Second of the Nutball Trilogy)

March 2nd - REAL Ghost Hunting at an Abandoned Zoo

March 3rd - We Bought a Camera That Can Look Inside Us

March 4th - Becoming the World's Greatest DJs

March 5th - Who Can Teach Their Dog a Trick the Fastest?

March 6th - Middle School Science Experiment Teaches Us About Life and Death
(note- Owl pellets)

March 7th - DIY Chiropractor

March 8th - Mark and Ethan Get Into a Fight

March 9th - The Barrel - Offical Music Video

March 10th - We Got Pepper Sprayed

March 11th - We Give Each Other Tattoos Blindfolded

March 12th - What Does Astrology Say About Our Friendship?

March 13th - Mark and Ethan Get a Full Body Scan to See What Secrets Lay Hidden Within (and learn their body fat)

March 14th - Mark Needs To Rub Ethan and Only His Mom Can Help Him

March 15th - 2 Idiots Get Crushed by 18-Foot Giant Snakes

March 16th - Beer Sauna: Turning a Portable Sauna into a Portable Hell
(note- The video where Pee Sauna was first mentioned)

March 17th - Mark and Ethan Hunt The World's Most Wanted Criminals

March 18th - Unus Annus Carves the Roast Beast

March 19th - 5 Weird Apps That Predicted Our Death

March 20th - We Tried a Labor Pain Simulator

March 21st - Recreating the Miracle of Childbirth

March 22nd - Mark and Ethan Are Now Fathers

March 23rd - We Force James Charles to Run a Military Obstacle Course

March 24th - Desperately Trying To Not Touch Our Faces
(note- Start of Quarintine videos)

March 25th - Reddit 50/50: Two Player Edition

March 26th - Going on an Internet Scavenger Hunt

March 27th - Having an Adventure In VR Chat Becuase We Can't Go Outside

March 28th - Amazon Shopping for the Apocalypse

March 29th - Whom Would Eat Whomst First in a Zombie Apocalypse?

March 30th - Ultimate Youtuber Boxing Showdown

March 31st - The Deep End of Omegle: Risky Boogalo
(note- This video was deleted for an unknown reason)

April 1st - Where in the World is Unus Annus?
(note- Timer was at 401 days)

April 2nd - Mark Builds a Pillow Fort for the Very First Time

April 3rd - Mark's 1 Weird Talent Leaves Ethan Absolutely Speechless

April 4th - Wikifeet: A Tale of 2 Tootsies

April 5th - We Made Every YouTuber Battle in the Hunger Games

April 6th - We Google Each Other to Find Our Darkest Forgotten Sins

April 7th - We Played Mad Libs and Ran It Through Google Translate

April 8th - Mark and Ethan Desperately Try and Nae a Single State in the USA

April 9th - Speed Reading 1000+ WPM To Gain a Complete Understanding of All Human Knowledge

April 10th - What is the Least Viewed Video on YouTube

April 11th - We Found Websites That The World Forgot About

April 12th - The Scariest True Stories on the Internet

April 13th - How to NOT be the Perfect Boyfriend

April 14th - Mark and Ethan Find The Lost City of EL Dorado

April 15th - Mark and Ethan Bet Everything on a Wikipedia Race

April 16th - The Creepiest Videos on Youtube

April 17th - Help Us Break a YouTube World Record
(note- The birth of Norbert Moses. The video was called "Subscribe to Norbert Moses")

April 18th - 2 Men 200 Accents

April 19th - The Illuminati... Do They Really Exist?

April 20th - Using Google Maps to Find the Lost City of Atlantis

April 21st - Reading YOUR Scariest True Stories

April 22nd - Mark and Ethan Take a Personality Test

April 23rd - Will AI Soon Take Over Humanity As We Know It?

April 24th - Running Internet Drama through Google Translate

April 25th - The Secret Unus Annus NO-Touchy-Touchy Hand Shake

April 26th - Two Male Men Judge Female Women on Their Beauty

April 27th - Bored? Press This Button.

April 28th - Don't Go in the Ocean... Ever.

April 29th - We Explore the Most MYSTERIOUS Mysteries of our Wildy Mysterious Mystery Moon of Mysteries

April 30th - We Looked at Unus Annus Memes

May 1st - Is Mark a Masochist?
(note- yes.)

May 2nd - What the Hell is a Pink Trombone?

May 3rd - Professional Fetish Scientists Rank the Best/Worst Fetishes of 2020

May 4th - Mark and Ethan Desperately Attempt to Feel Something

May 5th - An A.I. Generates Out Worst Nightmare

May 6th - Are Reptilian Humanoids Living Among us?

May 7th - Like It or Not... This is What The New Human Looks Like

May 8th - Eating Only Onions for 24 Hours: How Many Onions Does it Take to Kill a Man?

May 9th - Unus Annus ASMR

May 10th - We Attempted to Create THICC Water

May 11th - Making Our Own Gravestones to Prepare For Our Inevitable Demise

May 12th - How Tall Can A Human Get?: An Impartial Review by 2 Average Height Men

May 13th - Mark Teaches Ethan Korean

May 14th - Bigfoot is Real and It Ate My Friend

May 15th - The End of Unus Annus is Almost Here...
(note- The Halfway point)

May 16th - We Explore the Unus Annus Subreddit for Your Delicious Memes

May 17th - How Big Can a Nuke Get?

May 18th - How Much Caffeine Does It Take to Kill a Man?

May 19th - Drinking Real THICC Water... How Bad Does It Taste?

May 20th - We Played Strip Poker
(note- Mark lost so badly. Ethan also cheated on the first game)

May 21st - Harnessing Our Yodeling Power to End the World aAs We Know It

May 22nd - Mark Cooks Blindfolded While Ethan Guides Him Through FaceTime

May 23rd - We Played the Newlywed Game While Consuimg That Which Will Kill the Other

May 24th - DIY Boob

May 25th - We Have the Best Bellies on Youtube

May 26th - The Unus Annus Confessional Booth

May 27th - DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 2080
(note- Mark will be 90 and Ethan will be 83)

May 28th - Only UNUS-es May Watch This Video
(note- Unus vs Annus. Most Likes to Win.)

May 28th - Only ANNUS-es May Watch This Video
(note- Annus vs Unus. Most Likes to Win.)

May 29th - Only Watch from 2:15 to 6:11 --- DO NOT WATCH ANY OTHER PART OF THE VIDEO
(note- Annus Won)

May 30th - DIY Wine

May 31st - Tearing a Phone Book in Half with Our Huge Manly Muscles

June 1st - 2 Complete Amateurs Enter a Body Building Competition

June 2nd - BLACK LIVES MATTER. Resources and How You Can Help in the Description.
(note- This video was 8 Minutes and 47 seconds of silence)

June 3rd - Crushing Watermelons Betwixt Our Mighty Thighs

June 4th - Morphing Our Bodies Into Superhero Poses

June 5th - Reacting to Your Hilarious Green Screen Memes

June 6th - Mark Teaches Ethan to Read with Hooked on Phonics

June 7th - Ethan Roasts Mark of 15 Minutes Straight

June 8th - There's Something Horribly Wrong with This Picture...
(note- When they made their own creepy photos)

June 9th - Attempting to Build IKEA Furniture Without Instructions

June 10th - Mark and Ethan Become United State Citizens

June 11th - We Made Fanart for Each Other

June 12th - Our Fans Try and Scare Us with Their Homemade Creepypasta

June 13th - Recreating Childhood Photos

June 14th - Will We Break the Boards... Or Will They Break Us?

June 15th - Finding the Most Cursed Image on the Internet

June 16th - Learning to Cry on Command to Increase Our YouTube Views

June 17th - Pee Sauna
(note- The end of quarintine videos. Second of the Pee Trilogy)

June 18th - Building IKEA's Hardest Piece of Furniture Without Instruction is Impossible

June 19th - Becoming One With the Horse

June 20th - The Ultimate Paper Airplane Showdown

June 21st - Creating Mark FISHbach
(note- Origin of Mermer

June 22nd - Leaning How to Lock Pick (FBI Please Don't Watch)

June 23rd - The Most Dangerous Shave

June 24th - Ethan Traps Mark's Soul in the Palm of his Hand

June 25th - Bear Trapping 101: An Elegant Knot For An Elegant Beast

June 26th - 2 Men In a Trench Coat Teach You How to Save Money at the Movies

June 27th - Building the World's First IKEA Boat

June 28th - Ethan Teaches Mark How to Swim

June 29th - 10 Miracle Products to Give YOU the Thiccest Jaw on Planet Earth

June 30th - 2 Dirty Boys Wash Their Filthy Mouths Out with Soap

July 1st - Mark is Guilty. Ethan Has the Proof.

July 2nd - Recreating Mark's Childhood

July 3rd - We Put an Apple Watch in a Rock Tumbler

July 4th - Dummy Thicc for Dummies | A Tale of 2 Butts | Pushing Our Butts Even Further Beyond

July 5th - Reverse Engineering a Kite to Steal the Idea of Electricity From Benjamin Franklin

July 6th - The Candy Bra Challenge

July 7th - Mark and Ethan Look at a Puppy for 10 Minutes

July 8th - Unus Annus Try Pole Dancing

July 9th - This Is Hiding On Your Body RIGHT NOW.

July 10th - Tasting Weird Food Combos: Pickles and Chocolate? Ice Cream and Soy Sauce?

July 11th - The Unus Annus Space Program

July 12th - The Egg Smashing Game

July 13th - Can You Bake a Cookie from Cookie Dough Ice Cream?

July 14th - Bleachus Annus

July 15th - Dunking Oreos In Literally Anything But Milk

July 16th - Preparing a 5-Star Meal for Our Youtube Famous Dogs

July 17th - DIY Teeth

July 18th - How to Escape from a Hostage Situation

July 19th - Does This Magnetic Skincare Routine Really Work?

July 20th - DIY Bed of Nails : OH GOD, PLEASE DON'T EVER TRY THIS

July 21st - The Human Mop

July 22nd - Can Sound Therapy Heal All Wounds?

July 23rd - This Is The Most Dangerous Children's Toy Ever Made

July 24th - Would Chica Save Us From Drowning?

July 25th - We Do It Better Than Icarus Ever Could

July 26th - The Beginning of The End
(note- 110 days left. Start of the Desert videos)

July 27th - The Annual Unus Annus Dunk Contest

July 28th - Ultimate Horseshoes

July 29th - A Serious Conversation Under the Stars
(note- Last of the Desert videos)

July 30th - Recharging Our Phones Using Only Brute Strength

July 31st - 5 Products to Grow Your Patchy Beard

August 1st - Mark Teaches Ethan How to Play the Trumpet

August 2nd - Playing Cards: The World's Deadliest Weapon

August 3rd - We Lubed Our Floor For a Sliding Competition

August 4th - Breaking Glass With Our Screams

August 5th - This is Goodbye
(note- 100 Days Left)

August 6th - Mark and Ethan Share a Drink

August 7th - The Wubble

August 8th - Mark and Ethan Shave Chica

August 9th - DO NOT TRY THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

August 10th - Judging Your Terrible Unus Annus Ideas

August 11th - Hydro Dipping a Baby

August 12th - Popping Popcorn with a High-Powered Laser

August 13th - Puberty Simulator

August 14th - Grip Strength Test: Loser Becomes the Winner's Butler for a Day
(note- Ethan "won" but Mark never became his Butler)

August 15th - Transforming Mark into the 8th Wonder of the World

August 16th - Momiplier Teaches Self-Defense

August 17th - Playing Children's Games in Total Darkness

August 18th - We're Better Than Dogs

August 19th - The Koala Challenge: TikTok's Intimate Couple's Trend

August 20th - 1 Gallon of Jello Nearly Broke Us

August 21st - Too Many Pickles
(note- The Video before the start of Camp Unus Annus)

August 22nd - Pitching a Tent in the Woods But There's a Bear 15 Feet Away
(note- Start of Camp Unus Annus. Mark was Blind while Ethan was Deaf)

August 23rd - How to Rescue a Cat from a Tree

August 24th - A Bear Attacked Us in the Middle of the Night

August 25th - How to Safely Bury Your Friend

August 26th - Team Building for 2: Trust Fall, Tug-of-War, and More!

August 27th - How to Start a Fire (except don't...)
(note- The infamous video where Unus appears at the window before Mark kills Ethan)

August 28th - Mark's Outdoor Escape Room

August 29th - Hunting HeeHoo

August 30th - Was 2020 a Bad Year for Unus Annus?
(note- End of Camp Unus Annus)

August 31st - Mark Gives Ethan a HOT (stone) Massage

September 1st - We Smell Every Smell

September 2nd - How Many Slaps Does It Take to Cook a Chicken?

September 3rd - 2 Boys 2 Poops

September 4th - Mark Teaches Ethan How to March in a Marching Band

September 5th - We Finally Drank Our DIY Wine

September 6th - 2 Adults Take a 4th Grade Math Test

September 7th - Making Snow Cones With Literally Anything but Normal Flavors

September 8th - We Attempts Pottery Without Amy's Help

September 9th - Can Plants Feel Pain?

September 10th - How Far Can We Chuck a 16lbs Rock?

September 11th - We Pierced Each Other's Ears

September 12th - We Ate Dog Treats So You Don't Have To

September 13th - We Accidentally Made an SCP While Amy Was Away

September 14th - BEYBLADE NUTBALL
(note- The Finale of the Nutball Trilogy)

September 15th - Making the Ultimate Unus Annus Burger

September 16th - Making Soda With Literally Anything But Soda

September 17th - Pee Soda
(note- The Finale of the Pee Trilogy)

September 18th - Learning to Use The Force

September 19th - Brick Soccer

September 20th - We Attempt to Make Holy Water

September 21st - Amy Sent Us a Mystery Box

September 22nd - Mark Knows What Ethan Did...
(note- Ethan cheated on the Grip Test Video)

September 23rd - This Video Will Never Make Sense

September 24th - We Attempt to Make UNHOLY Water

September 25h - We Will Churn Thy Butter

September 26th - Ethan Teaches Mark Gymnastics

September 27th - The Great Ice Cream Cake Race

September 28th - Mark Teaches Ethan to Wrestle

September 29th - Ethan Watches as Mark Achieves the Impossible

September 30th - Consuming the World's Hottest Chip

October 1st - This Video Went Completely Out of Control

October 2nd - The 1000 High Five Challenge

October 3rd - Bobbing For Apples But the Water Keeps Getting Thiccer

October 4th - Mark Breaks His Nose On An Aerial Hoop
(note- Was the second time in one week)

October 5th - Mark and Ethan Milk a Goat

October 6th - Shooting Archery ON A HORSE

October 7th - DIY Minesweeper

October 8th - Literally Finding a needle in a Haystack

October 9th - Drawing on Each Other's Backs in Total Darkness

October 10th - This is For FUN and NOT a Fetish
(note- They were in black bags with a vacuum to such out the air)

October 11th - Mark Conquers His Fear of Night Swimming
(note- Birth of the Gongoozler)

October 12th - The Painful Wolrd of Aerial Silks

October 13th - We Bought Every Grinch Costume on Ebay

October 14th - Pumpkin Taste Tier List

October 15th - Learn to Jump Higher in 16 Minutes and 16 Seconds

October 16th - Bobbing for Literally Anything but Apples

October 17th - This Video is Completely Unedited
(note- This is the video where they shoved Wax up their nose and Marks got stuck)

October 18th - Momiplier Tells Us True Scary Stories from Korea

October 19th - Pumpkin Spice "Challenge"
(note- Similar to the Cinnamon Challenge excpet with Pumpkin Spice and don't do this please)

October 20th - Mark and Ethan Build a Scarecrow

October 21st - Preassure Waching Our Sins Away

October 22nd - We Force Mark to Swin in the Ocean (HIS GREATEST FEAR)
(note- First of the Two Boat videos)

October 23rd - Fighting Fish to the Deathin in the Deep Blue Sea
(note- Second of the Two Boat Videos

October 24th - Cryptid Olympics

October 25th - Phasmophobia in Real Life
(note- Ghost hunt time)

October 26th - Edward Pumpkin Hands
(note- First Video in big spooky house)

October 27th - Blood Bath

October 28th - The Unus Annus Annual Costume Contest
(note- Second Video in big spooky house)

October 29th - Ethan Turns Mark into a Werewolf

October 30th - Ethan Kidnapped Mark
(note- Third Video in big spooky house. Ethan made Mark an escape room)

October 31st - The Truth of Unus Annus
(note- Final Video in the big house. They open the Custom Coffin and change from their clothes into their suits. 13 Days Left)

November 1st - Accepting the Truth
(note- They Accept they are going to die. They remain in their suits from this point onward)

November 2nd - The Unus Annus Last Supper

November 3rd - Being Brutally Honest with Each Other
(note- Mark cries)

November 4th - Recreating Every Single Unus Annus Video
(note- 45 minutes and 11 seconds. Longest video)

November 5th - All Our Video Ideas That Never Happened

November 6th - Who's Cutting Onions In Here???

November 7th - The 1st Annual Unus Annus Roast

November 8th - God's Fitness Test

November 9th - Saying Goodbye to All Our Guests

November 10th - Everything's Legal If You're Dead
(note- Cooking with Sex Toys 2)

November 11th - 7 Minutes in Heaven | 7 Minutes in Hell
(note- Ethan got heaven, Mark got hell)

November 12th - The Unus Annus Annual Sleepover
(note- The final video.)

November 13th - Goodbye.
(note- The final livestream.)

Flatten the Curve. Part 69. Epstein,Thiel, Eric Prince all connect to China and the PROC surveillance system. The connection? Israeli cybersecurity unit 8200. Plus, whatever became of Blackwater?

Previous post here
Let's have a deeper look into Epstein, Thiel, and their connections to the world around us.

August 9, 2019: TRT World • The billionaire (Jeffery Epstein) shared the same personal network that included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, infamous Blackwater founder Erik Prince, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, UAE Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.

That's a bit of an exclusive club, kinda like being in the Mouseketeer CIA club. But, hey, nothing to see here, is there? But just in case, let's look into the company that Epstein and Thiel invested in, Carbyne.

This single company, Carbyne, brought together a who’s who of power brokers and intelligence figures from multiple regions including Russia, China and the Trump administration itself, with Epstein at its heart. Officially, Carbyne provided high-tech solutions for emergency centres. In reality, it existed in a grey area giving it unprecedented access to private information, with significant potential for privacy abuse. Carbyne provides a service for police emergency centres, providing complete access to the caller’s camera and GPS, providing the dispatcher with a live video feed.

President Trump was in Isreal and Saudi Arabia in May 2017. And who ended up in Isreal just afterwards?

June 15, 2017: Haaretz • Billionaire Peter Thiel visits Israel – and gives out tips on how to build a successful startup. Source Here

Hey, one month after Trump visited the Middle East, Peter Thiel decides to take a middle eastern vacation to give out business tips. And then Thiel must've reciprocated and invited the Fresh Prince of Saudi Arabia to get the all inclusive Palantir surveillance pitch. Smile for the camera everyone, cause the world's a stage and we're filming a world wide Truman Show.

April 7, 2018: Gulf News • Google, Thiel feature in Saudi Prince’s Silicon Valley tour. The Saudi delegation visited several Silicon Valley corporate campuses, including Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc.

In addition to Facebook, where Thiel sits on the board, the Saudi delegation visited data-analysis start-up Palantir Technologies Inc and a trio of investment firms created by Thiel: Clarium Capital, Valar Ventures and Founders Fund. Thiel is chairman and co-founder of Palantir. Source Here March 17, 2020: Forbes • These responders are now using a tool built in part by former members of Israel’s military intelligence—Elichai being one—that’s backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is now the company’s chairman, and a small, passive investment from deceased multimillionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. SourceHere

And what's the APP that's fighting COVID-19? You guessed it, Carbyne.
Ok look. I get it. Rich people make investments, those investments are bound to end up in the same company. But these companies aren't exactly run of the mill home security systems, are they? Nope. This is the kind of surveillance systems that the KGB or the Stasi could only dream of.
Ok. Strap in, buckle up, and try to keep up, or you're gonna get left in the dust. Cause it's boom or bust from here on out, and we're gonna add it up like the count.
So Elichai owns Carbyne, and used to work with the Israeli 8200 cyber unti. Peter Thiel and Jeffery Epstein invested in Carbyne. And Carbyne is in the USA linked to the 911 system, and it's being used to fight the pandemic.

Forbes (Link Above) • Its founder thinks Carbyne’s tech could make the lives of 911 dispatch and healthcare professionals much less chaotic in the Covid-19 crisis. Carbyne relies on callers submitting themselves to self-surveillance via their own mobile phone. Once a caller uses their Android or iPhone to call 911 (85% of emergency calls now come from mobile devices), they receive a text message that asks for permission to get their precise location and access video from their smartphone camera.

Step right up and give your permission to be saved. Big Brother is looking out for you. Big Brother will keep you safe. And the Technocrats will be im charge of Big Brother. Trust in the Technocrats that are promising us an AI utopia! The same Technocrats that seem to be getting ahead of the curve by building doomsday bunkers for a dystopia. And here we sit wasting our time Doomscrolling.
So what else has sprung up from the 8200? Have you ever heard about the NSO Group?

November 1, 2019 - WhatsApp identified an Israeli company, NSO Group, as having developed the spyware called Pegasus, which it held responsible for the breach. This disclosure was part of a lawsuit WhatsApp has filed against the NSO Group in a US federal court, saying the company was actively involved in hacking users of the encrypted chat service. As per the WhatsApp complaint the “target users included attorneys, journalists, human rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and other senior foreign government officials.” NSO’s spyware Pegasus has been reportedly used to target journalists in Mexico investigating drug cartels, rights group Amnesty International, human rights activists in UAE, activists in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. According to Israeli news reports, Saudi Arabia paid $55 million for its use. The contract was later frozen over the scandal alleging NSO software's role in Saudi Arabia tracking slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the months before he was murdered in the Saudi Embassy in Turkey. In India, 17 people, who are known to be targeted include activists and human rights lawyers. Source Here

Whoops. Do you remember Jamal Khashoggi? He was trying to expose Human Rights abuses against Saudi Arabia. And then Suadi Arabia decided to murder him, and confirm that they were abusing human rights. Jamal paid the ultimate price to prove his point. But who is selling the hacking tools? At this point they all seem to be springing up from members of the 8200, and the companies they started.

TRT - Link Previously Provided • DarkMatter, a UAE surveillance and intelligence group employing former NSA operatives was built on the back of a larger initiative to modernise Emirati intelligence and military operations. The group took part in at the Arab Future Cities Conference in November 2015, where it presented a vision of smarter, tech-driven cities, which caught the eye of Chinese officials. Smarter cities meant Big Brother-esque widespread surveillance installed throughout the UAE. Only two years later in April 25 2017, DarkMatter signed a Global Strategic Memorandum of Understanding with Huawei, a leading Chinese company, for the same ‘Big Data’ systems and ‘Smart City’ solutions. The middle man? None other than Erik Prince, who had gone from working for the Emiratis, to working for a Chinese billionaire. In suspect timing, the Memorandum of Understanding also took place right before China scaled up its total surveillance and crackdown on Uighurs in Xinjiang, China.

February 2, 2019: Reuters • Xinjiang is a major part of China's Belt and Road infrastructure network but the region has faced attacks blamed on members of the Muslim ethnic Uighur minority. Beijing has responded with a security clampdown condemned by rights groups and Western governments. Frontier Services Group (FSG), a Hong Kong-listed company founded by Prince, said in a Chinese-language statement posted on its website on Jan. 22 that it had signed a deal to build a training centre in southern Xinjiang. Prince is deputy chairman, a minority shareholder and a board member of FSG, a security, logistics and insurance provider. Source Here

Watch this video.

Chinese authorities are using a 911 mobile app to carry out illegal mass surveillance and arbitrary detention of Muslims in China’s western Xinjiang region. Source Here

Human Rights Watch revealed that Chinese authorities began to use an application much like Carbyne to surveil Uyghurs. Carbyne’s first 911 surveillance contract was installed in Fayette County in the US state of Georgia in 2018, the same time China’s nearly identical mass surveillance was launched. Unlike the limited use Carbyne’s 911 application saw in the US to report emergencies, China’s ‘Integrated Joint Operations Platform’ was a highly similar app for mass surveillance.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Aren't we condemning China for the camps and their omnipresent and oppressive surveillance state? But Eric Prince brokered a deal with Huawei for those surveillance systems being used by Dark Matter. And a system very similar to Carbyne is being used to round up Muslims in China. Crazy.

Recap.

8200 leads to NSO and Carbyne. DarkMatter is in the UAE with NSA employees. The NSO hack was used to capture Khashoggi. Peter Thiel invested in Facebook, Facebook owns WhatsApp. Peter Thiel and Jeffery Epstein invested in Carbyne. Eric Prince works for and founded FSG, which built the Muslim reduction school. China is using similar tech to target Muslims and send them back to school. Carbyne 911 surveillance tech accesses your phone camera after you click on the link to give permission. So. Peter Thiel funds Carbyne. Eric Prince is working for the UAE developing security and the UAE ends up with Dark Matter, who signed a contract with Huawei, and then his company (FSG) is sold to China, and they build re-education centers, which uses technology like Carbyne, and that technology is being used in the USA.

March 28, 2018: Daily Mail • Employee of Peter Thiel's company Palantir helped Cambridge Analytica harvest the data of millions of the Facebook users. Alfredas Chmieliauskas is said to have suggested to Cambridge Analytica that it create a personality quiz smartphone app to get access to networks of Facebook users. The Times report also claims that **Sophie Schmidt - the daughter former Google executive Eric Schmidt - had urged Cambridge Analytica to work with Palantir**. Source Here

The daughter of Eric Schmidt urged Cambridge Analytica to work with Palantir. The same Eric Schmidt that ran Google, the company that changed it's slogan from Don't Be Evil to Do the Right Thing. The same Eric Schmidt who left Google and went to work on the DoD advisory board. The same Eric who funded the group that came up withbthe term, Fake News. That Eric. Got ya. The business of Fake News is Fake News and Facebook should be renamed Fakebook, since a large portion of Fake News seems to come the site.

January 17, 2017: The Intercept • According to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in December Prince attended the annual “Villains and Heroes” costume ball hosted by Mercer. Dowd wrote that Palantir founder Peter Thiel showed her “a picture on his phone of him posing with Erik Prince, who founded the private military company Blackwater, and Mr. Trump — who had no costume — but joke[d] that it was ‘N.S.F.I.’ (Not Safe for the Internet).”

No. Sanity. Fracking. Involved. Is more like it. This insanity can't pass for sanity, can it? And yet they label us crazy when we start to find the big picture, even if we aren't entirely sure what the big picture means.

The Intercpt Continued: In July, Prince told Trump’s senior adviser and white supremacist Steve Bannon, at the time head of Breitbart News, that the Trump administration should recreate a version of the **Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination ring that operated during the Vietnam War, to fight ISIS. Such a program, Prince said, could kill or capture “the funders of Islamic terror and that would even be the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East, and any of the other illicit activities they’re in**.” Source Here

Sounds good, right? Kill people who kill people and maybe someday we won't have people getting killed. But then why are these cell phone surveillance hacks companies being constantly linked with their names, and those hacks are being used to target journalists and human rights activists? And why are Chertoff and Theil comparing journalists to terrorists?

May 18, 2009: Peter Thiel compares Valleywag, Gawker’s Silicon Valley-focused website, to Al Qaeda in an interview. “I think they should be described as terrorists, not as writers or reporters,” he said. “I don’t understand the psychology of people who would kill themselves and blow up buildings, and I don’t understand people who would spend their lives being angry.” Valleywag would go on to publish dozens of stories about Thiel and other high-profile figures in Silicon Valley. Source Here

Whelp. That escalated rather quickly, didn't it? And it sounds very familiar to this gem by Dick Perle Harbor: Added Perle: "Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly." Source Here
And then Khashoggi is killed and Gawker is finished. But the surveillance is to keep us safe. And the Fake News is to keep us safe. Safe from what? The truth, because the truth is dangerous in a small New Normal World Order after all. And it's getting smaller everyday. No worries though, Keep Calm and Carry On, We're All In This Together, and You're Either With Us Or Against Us. It's all good. That kind of thing could never happen here.

July 27, 2019: NARATIV • Michael Chertoff, who ran Homeland Security under George Bush, serves on Carbyne’s advisory board. Chertoff wrote the Patriot Act, which authorized digital surveillance of Americans. Source Here

Uh. Is nobody paying attention? Are the wolves guarding the sheep? Yep. And the tentacles are growing. It's all connected.
Need more proof?

September 16, 2015: Carlyle Group • The Carlyle Group and The Chertoff Group Acquire Majority Stake in Coalfire Systems. Founded in 2001 and based in Louisville, Colo., Coalfire is a global cybersecurity and technology services provider specializing in cyber risk advisory, compliance assessments, technical testing and software services for private enterprises and government organizations. With its technical depth and breadth of IT services, Coalfire serves clients in sectors including technology, retail, payments, healthcare, financial services, education, local and state government, and utilities. Source Here

The Carlyle Group and the Chertoff group bought the majority investment share in Coalfire Systems. The same Carlyle Group business dinner that the Bin Laden's were at the night before 9-11. And the same Michael Chertoff that wrote the Patriot Act that took away rights in the name of safety. Now these same groups have access to more data. And Chertoff sits on the board of directors for Carbyne, which may be linked to China and detention centers. Do you feel cyber safe now? Have a look. Flatten the Curve. Part 43. [Link Here](https://np.reddit.com/conspiracy/comments/i2g3i8/flatten_the_curve_part_43_unrestricted_warfare/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share]
The Pegasus hack {8200>Carbyne>NSO>Dark Matter} was reported on in 2017. One journalist died. 1,400 other journalists had their phones infected. And Fakebook didn't patch the vulnerability, until 2019 until Khashoggi was killed. Then they fixed it and sued the NSO.

Georgetown Security Studies Review • Facebook sued NSO Group immediately following the widespread reporting about Pegasus’s involvement in the operation that killed Jamal Khashoggi and its use on more than 1,400 victims. Congress deferred any action on the issue to Facebook as members wrestled with impeachment proceedings. Even though a Washington Post journalist was among the known victims, no bills or amendments were offered to respond to the news. Source Here

Final Thoughts

So Peter Thiel started Palantir with the help of In-Q-Tel. Then he invested into Fakebook. Then he invested in Carbyne, which has connections to the Israeli military cyber unit 8200, which has connections to the NSO, which made the Pegasus WhatsApp hack that Saudi Arabia used to kill Jamal Khashoggi, which Fakebook didn't patch when it became aware of the hack, just like they didn't stop the Cambridge Analytica situation, which Eric Schmidt's daughter knew about, but did she know that the Private Israeli Intelligence Agency Psy-Group was linked to Cambridge Analytica, which was also linked to Peter Thiel, who had along with Jeffery Epstein invested into Carbyne, and Jeffery also had a fake passport listing Saudi Arabia as his home address, which is where most of the terrorists were from that caused 9-11, which was apparently orchestrated by Bin Laden, whose brother was attending a Carlyle Group meeting the night before 9-11, which led to the Patriot Act, that was written by Michael Chertoff, who invested into Carbyne along with the Carlyle Group, whose 911 app is very similar to the Chinese app used for security in Xinjiang, and Eric Prince may have brokered the deal. Yet Eric Prince did sell FSG to Chinese interests, and that company may have built the re-education centers in Xinjiang. What was that company formerly called? Blackwater. So Eric Prince brokered the deal that gave PROC the surveillance system and sold them Blackwater that built the Xinjiang re-education centers. And now the drums of War are beating because of the instruments that the West sold them in the first place. Perfect. But wait, we just found out about the Muslim re-education centers didn't we? Strange. We must have thought the mercenary firm that had experience dealing with Muslim extremists was doing humanitarian work and the surveillance system was for implementing a 9-11 system into China.
Not everything is as it seems. Not in the West. Not in the East. Are there re-education centers? Yes. But the PROC states they are there to get citizens on the same page as their society. They don't want a questioning population breaking down social cohesion. At least the West doesn't feel threatened by a questioning population. Nope. That's what Fake News warnings are for. For now.
More information soon. Keep your head up and eyes open.

Why I'm leaving the Linux world and going back to Windows

I started using Linux in 2014. Since then, I've usually kept a dual boot of Windows and some distro (I've tried them all).
But after all these years of constantly stepping over my own shoe laces with Linux problems, I'm throwing in the towel. I don't think Linux is usable as a daily driver unless you're a programmecli enthusiast, don't use your PC for anything but web browsing, or you can't afford a $5 license key to Windows 10 on eBay.
I know this post will be long, but I want to highlight the specific issues I have with Linux, so the problems can be identified and hopefully fixed.

There Are No Good Distributions

I made a post earlier about this so for sake of not being redundant I'll link that here: https://www.reddit.com/DistroHopping/comments/iukmqq/i_feel_like_im_not_satisfied_with_any_distro/
Every distro has severe problems that are simply unthinkable on Windows. You always gotta sacrifice something essential. From stability, having updated software or software availability. A good OS should have all 3 of these things. Windows and Mac do this flawlessly, so why can't Linux?

Terrible DEs

The Windows desktop is modern and beautiful. There's a couple ads on a fresh install but that's it. It's buttery smooth, has all the features you need, is organized well, and feels professional.
I can use the Windows desktop on a daily basis and forget it exists cause it just gets out of my way and works great. I took this for granted when switching to Linux; Linux desktops are a sad joke that usually desperately try to copy Windows while lacking features and having severe bugs. Let's go through em' shall we:

Gnome: A bloated phone with horrible backwards compatibility with extensions and themes. No desktop icons or folder previews. Every time you want to open an app, you gotta deal with this massive on-screen app drawer that interrupts your workflow. You can use extensions like arc-menu to fix this, until Gnome breaks the APIs for it in the next version.
KDE Plasma: A seizure of a desktop with many UI problems and bugs that add up. There are like 10 different theming apps that all do the same thing. Breeze-dark is an ugly grey wireframe. The settings are an unorganized disaster. Why do some themes break on Nvidia while Gnome handles them fine? Why can't Dolphin have sane keyboard shortcuts? The default apps for KDE suck a big one. KDE's PIM Suite (kaddressbook, korganizer) is absolutely pathetic and idk how to even use it, nor does anyone else. KDE is like Windows XP on meth to emulate Windows 10. Or to give a better analogy, like Steve Urkel on meth to emulate Arnold Schwarzenegger. Simply terrible.
Cinnamon: Feels like a cheap dinky JS bootleg of Windows 10. Everything is so clunky and low-quality. The animations feel unnatural, and it integrates poorly with both GTK and Qt apps. It's the least-shit DE imo, but it's basically a cheap Windows clone.
Xfce, lxde, lxqt, mate: Fine for old computers but not-so for modern computers. A lot of them are ugly and lack features. None of them have proper search indexing. XFCE has no window animations, Mate has no app search, lxde is abandonware that uses abandonware (openbox) as its window manager, and lxqt is a bugfest.
TWMs: The only people who take them seriously are these "DE is bloat" hipsters with no life beyond ricing their Arch Linux system. I'm not learning a ton of keyboard shortcuts and config files for an interface that's 1/64th the quality of the one on Windows.

Having a DE that's both feature-rich and stable is extremely important, and not a single DE in Linux fills that criteria.
And no, Linux DE's aren't ahead of the curve compared to Windows. Linux fanboys like to make the one argument that "Linux did multi desktop stuff first". Yeah well Windows had functioning backup/restore like 20 years before Linux (Linux is just now figuring this out with btrfs), as well as a consistent theme and great usability even in the Windows 95 days. Idc which came first. I care about which works better, which Windows takes the crown in that case.

Lack of reliable software

I already mentioned how most DEs suck, but the same can be said for most Linux software. FOSS Software just sucks ass from a straw compared to Windows.

Libreoffice is like Word from 2003. No publisher counterpart. Also setting margins and background color for one specific page is impossible afaik
GIMP isn't that bad, but it is clunky and has a sloppy interface. Also it has a bunch of slow legacy filters and stuff duct taped onto it.
Inkscape crashes all the time and has a shit interface that lags severely
Kdenlive has a sloppy confusing interface and is basically a shittier Vegas Pro. Kdenlive is the ONLY usable video editor for Linux that I've found. The rest lack features and/or have major bugs and crashes.
Virtualbox is utter crap compared to VMWare. Good luck getting guest additions running on any distro without doing some gcc command line bullshit (works out of the box in VMWare btw). Don't get me started on qemu
Rhythmbox is ugly and confusing compared to MusicBee on Windows.
Gaming is a battle of hack-jobs that can render your system unbootable if you don't know what you're doing. Most steam games don't support it. Lutris can literally render your system unbootable if some publisher fucks up the install script
No good free TTS software exists for Linux. God only knows how to use pinwheel or if it's even worth the effort.
No animation software exists for Linux either.

Linux can't just have good software that works. Most of these softwares are buggy, lack features, have theming issues and just wanna copy their proprietary counterparts without offering anything new. I wouldn't mind it much if I can just use proprietary software that's already on Windows (you get what you pay for). But on Linux, it's just not that simple. You're forced to use the FOSS counterparts and you wanna know why?: Linux has a shit business model.
The idea behind Linux is that everything is free and open source. The problem with that is, nobody has any reason to contribute to Linux except for the fun of it. You can't make money off of FOSS software. The only way you can pump money into Linux is for a dev to have a job and deliberately funnel money into Linux out of the kindness of their heart (which is what Gnome Team does). You can't just pay a team to make software and make money back from that software, like yknow, a functioning business.
Don't get me wrong, I love FOSS software in moderation. I like having privacy and being able to spin that software into something of my own. But unless you can give people a strong, immediate reason to contribute then Linux will fester in its measly 3rd place in the OS market.

Excessive tribalism and arrogance in the fanbase

The fanbase is one of the biggest reasons I stopped using Linux. It's this hellhole of arrogance and tribalism who throws a rage fit towards anyone who even slightly disagrees with their opinion. I'm sure I'll get one or 2 comments on this post like "well good bye pleb windows user" without ANY counterargument to prove me wrong or start a legit debate.
It's just a sad joke, up there with the Sonic and Kpop fanbase in terms of the raw sewage of the Internet. These are the type of douche-sockets you're gonna commonly find in this fanbase:

Elitist Arch hipsters who think a DE is bloat and dwm is made by god. Yet they tend to learn a billion keyboard shortcuts and dig through config files to "save time and maximize productivity". Don't want that mouse cursor distracting you from browsing /pol/ memes and posting riced desktops to /unixporn
RMS circlejerkers. Aka greybeards who refuse to use any proprietary software yet trip over their own shoe laces with driver issues and subpar alternatives. I personally don't like RMS that much; He's like the Carl Marx of the Linux world and has been accused of things like pedophilia, not that Bill Gates is much better.
People who use Linux cause they think it's private or some shit. Intel and AMD has a backdoor into your CPU (Intel ME, AMD PSP). As long as that exists, fuck privacy. Not to mention excessive data collection on the Internet (such as Reddit for example). Are you gonna hardmod those backdoors out (or use ARM) and route your machine through Tor without signing up for anything? Get real.
Those who viciously hate Windows for reasons that stopped being valid 20 years ago. In my own experience, Windows isn't this BSOD virus-ridden shit show with ads. Not saying it doesn't have problems, but no DE on Linux can even compare to the buttery-smoothness, features and reliability of the one on Windows, and no Linux software can compare to the easy and beauty of MS Office, Photoshop, and most Steam games. Not even close. No exceptions.

There's a reason I didn't make this post in /linux. Cause you'll literally by BANNED for saying ANYTHING negative about Linux there, after getting mass downvoted. Precisely because you disagree with the Linux collective, you'll be shadow-banned from the subreddit cause you rustled the jimmies of it's cuntbag mods. Yeah, it's that insane. So much for freedom. I'm hoping this subreddit at least leaves my post up after mass downvoting it.
Most linux fans are okay, it's just the vocal minority that ruin it for everyone. And I'm not saying that you're a terrible person for liking Linux. You probably see something in it that I don't.

Conclusion

Linux has its pros It's the de-facto option for servers and fun to tinker with and learn about computing. But going from Windows to Linux is like going from the new Ferrari to a Honda Civic with 300k miles on it, and I simply can't take it anymore. I'm sick of fixing problems that were the OS-developer's responsibility to fix 20 years ago, and I'm sick of missing out on basic features.
And no it's not because I'm not willing to learn a new OS. It's because of subpar garbage software that simply cannot compare to it's proprietary counterparts in terms of functionality, and a doubtful business model as poorly-thought-out as a pyramid scheme.
I'll try Linux again in a few years when Microsoft starts asking for blood samples, but I doubt Linux will be anything but 3rd place. I got things to do and my life is finite, and I'm not wasting it on an OS that can't take itself seriously and is blinded by its own idealism I'm not making this post out of malice, I'm doing it to point out the specific problems with Linux so they can be fixed and Linux can potentially one day rival Windows. But for now, peace.

jokes phone app hack video

Calls are launched from our phone systems so they will be at no cost for you. In few minutes your joke will be available on your app, ready to be listened and shared with the rest of your friends. Download JokesPhone NOW and LOL with your friends!. In just two minutes will be available on your mobile phone and you can listen to it and share it. What is Juasapp Hack-Unlimited Prank-Calls Jokes Anonymous: ... Anonymous Hack Jokes Juasapp Calls Unlimited is available for all versions of Android and all versions for iOS. You can use the modal to explain one of your app's features/benefits in details. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. In enim justo, rhoncus ut, imperdiet a, venenatis vitae, justo. Nullam dictum felis eu pede mollis pretium. Integer tincidunt. Cras dapibus. Vivamus elementum semper nisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit ame ... Hacking a phone with just the number is difficult but it’s possible. If you want to hack someone’s phone number, you have to gain access to their phone and install a spy app into it. Once you do that, you gain access to all of their phone records and online activities. However, if the phone number belongs to an iPhone, you’re luckier. It cannot hack anything and is intended to be used for practical jokes. --= You Got Hacked Prank App =-- Fill In The Name Of The Person You Want To Prank And Your Message And Choose The Delay 1,2,3 Minutes Then Click Start and Open Another App Or Game on your phone And Give The Phone to the person you want to prank And Wait the app will pop up after the delay as a terminal And this tool can hack all the data which your victim has. And also this is a very old and greatest spy tool on the internet. Snapchat hack with TrustSpy tool. TrustSpy Tool. TrustSpy is also a spy tool same as mSpy. All you need to do is install this app in your victim's mobile device and then you can simply get all the data from your victim's ... How To Hack Into Someone’s Phone Hacking a cell phone with just the phone number is simple. To monitor your spouse, employee, kids, business partner, you will have to make use of Ultimate Phone spy app. What makes Ultimate Phone spy stand out from others is that there are zero chances of your partner and others finding out about this. The app uses your phone’s camera to measure the motion speed of nearby moving objects such as cars, baseballs, skiers, and more. For Android users, the Speed Gun app is a similar tool. "So I've got a little iPhone hack that I use which means you can open the app just by tapping the back of your phone twice." She then explains the process that takes less than a minute to complete ... Download Hack -You Got Hacked Prank App for Android to be a real hacker and hack your friends phone for the ultimate laugh.

Hack -You Got Hacked Prank App for Android - APK Download

jokes phone app hack

jokes phone app hack - win

EMERGENCY: CHECK THIS FILE PATH RIGHT NOW

I investigate the link between monsters and missing people. The trees are a death trap.

NYT article on scammers.

I know this will get downvoted, but... why do you insist on using email authentication?

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

A list of every Unus Annus video name

Flatten the Curve. Part 69. Epstein,Thiel, Eric Prince all connect to China and the PROC surveillance system. The connection? Israeli cybersecurity unit 8200. Plus, whatever became of Blackwater?

Watch this video.

Recap.

Final Thoughts

Why I'm leaving the Linux world and going back to Windows

There Are No Good Distributions

Terrible DEs

Lack of reliable software

Excessive tribalism and arrogance in the fanbase

Conclusion

jokes phone app hack video

jokes phone app hack top