I try to limit my time on YouTube as much as possible. I feel down the rabbit hole too many times before, so now I only watch YouTube videos while I'm eating (it's too quiet otherwise, I'm all alone) and I usually just open YouTube, go to my Subscriptions and pick something from there. At some point I realised I didn't actually watch the channels I am subscribed to and decided I want to change that. This is working great so far, I don't spend a lot of time looking for something and I also save music videos to my watch later list so I won't have to hunt for new music when I feel like it. It's a win-win situation.
Of course, I do get the ocassional suggestion on the homepage that catches my attention and a few days ago I got a suggestion for a video uploaded by Jim Browning. I'm going to focus on talking about his channel in this post.
For those of you who don't know, like I didn't know a week ago, Jim Browning is a tech god.
Not really, I think, but pretty damn close.
What's great about this channel is that Jim Browning is tracking and exposing scams. You know, those annoying pop ups that tell you there's a virus on your computer, or that your computer 'talked' to Microsoft and told them something is wrong, and he even answers calls from people claiming to have some sort of reward or that they are from some agency, stuff like that.
What I find awesome about this videos is that Jim Browning takes his time to talk to these people, pretends to not know much about computers and while the scammers do their thing, he figures out how the scam works, who is behind it, and how he can save potential victims.
There are a lot of scamming tactics, and the scammers are shockingly good at it. Their main strength lays in knowing just what to do and what to say to make a person believe them. They are targeting vulnerable people who simply don't know how these things work, they are not able to spot a scam and fall right into it. Some of these people are scammed out of huge amounts of money, their life savings are stolen with no remorse from the scammers. I watched such a video these days, where a person has been scammed of a big amount of money, it shook me and I'll share it down bellow.
Unfortunately, despite the threat of being scammed and the scammers making (i.e. stealing) huge amounts of money every year, the authorities are either not equipped or don't care enough to get to the bottom of this practice and put a stop to it. Maybe if they would show at least an ounce of interest, scammers would think twice before getting a pop up running. Recently there's been a raid at one call centre operated by scammers thanks to Jim Browning. He accessed the centre's CCTV system and in association with Panorama they produced a documentary that aired in March and reached the responsible authorities.
Jim Browning does an amazing job and educates us at the same time. I was surprised and I learned so much at the same time just by watching his videos. I knew the concept of a scam and how to avoid it, but I didn't realise just how big of an "industry" it is and how many ways there are for scamming someone.
Needless to say I encourage you to watch his videos on yt, and to share them with your more susceptible to fall for a scam friends and family. If you missed it above, here's the link to Jim Browning's channel, as well as a link to his twitter. If you also want to see some scammers getting angry while having their time wasted, I've been having a lot of fun watching Kitboga and Pierogi.
And as promised, here's the video I mentioned above, this one from Trilogy Media.
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