Kitboga (streamer)
Kitboga is an American Twitch streamer and YouTuber whose content primarily focuses on scambaiting. As of April 2020, his channel has gained over 630,000 followers on Twitch and his YouTube channel has over one million subscribers.[1][2]
| Kitboga | |
|---|---|
| Personal information | |
| Nationality | American |
| Website | Kitboga.com |
| Twitch information | |
| Channel | |
| Years active | 2017–present |
| Genre | Scambaiting |
| Followers | 1.03M subscribers |
| Total views | 18,689,666 |
| Follower and view counts updated as of May 29, 2020. | |
| YouTube information | |
|---|---|
| Channel | |
| Years active | 2017–present |
| Genre | Scambaiting |
| Subscribers | 1.03 million (23 June 2020) |
| Total views | 136,398,270 (23 June 2020) |
Premise
Kitboga began baiting in mid-2017 after he found out that his grandmother was a victim of many types of scams designed to prey on the elderly, both online and in person.[3] He holds that, by wasting the time of scammers, he is preventing them from scamming others and is also providing a source of entertainment and education to his viewers. In doing so, he mixes elements of popular culture into his dialogue during scam calls.[4]
Scambaiting
In his videos, Kitboga engages in scambaiting several types of scammers, a majority of whom operate call centers in India. Besides technical support scammers, he also engages with refund scammers, IRS scammers, and others.
To misdirect scammers away from his real identity, as well as for viewer entertainment, Kitboga often acts as a number of characters during his videos, including an 80-year-old grandmother named Edna and a granny named Matilda,[5] a Russian man named Vicktor Viktoor,[6] a valley girl named Nevaeh,[7] or sometimes even a competing technical support scammer named Daniel. He does this by imitating the accent or vocal intonation of the character he is trying to portray, in addition to oftentimes using a voice changer to alter the pitch of his voice. However, the common factor uniting all these characters is that they are not computer-savvy, giving the scammer confidence that the would-be victim is more likely to fall for the ruse.[8][9]
Characters
With the use of some hardware voice changer (Roland VT-3 and GoXLR) and different accents, Kitboga role-plays multiple characters, often related to each other. Different names are frequently used for the characters below. Also, his friend and streaming colleague "MiltonTPike1" supports him occasionally as a guest voice. Furthermore, he announced that he's in contact with a voice coach to create new characters with different accents.
| Name | Age | Voice type | Gender | Description / Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chad | 20s | Stereotypical Chad | Male | Mostly as a big brother or co-worker. |
| Daniel | 20s | Normal voice | Male | Scammer who works for "World Wide Web Wide Web Tech Professionals". |
| Dixie | 40s | Southern | Female | Sometimes a cashier or employee in a random store and wife of Jebediah. |
| Edmund | 70-85 | Senior | Male | Male equivalent to Edna. Often goes by the name Billy Maizear, a reference to the late television salesperson Billy Mays. Billy/Edmund is also being used as the voice of Kitboga's AI machine that converses with scammers. |
| Edna | 70-85 | Senior | Female | Typical grandma and mother of Dixie. Sometimes under the name of "Matilda" instead. She has a cat called "Mr. Whiskas". |
| Jebediah | 40s | Southern | Male | Propane salesman (a reference to Hank Hill), believes the Earth is flat. |
| Tyler | 12-14 | Teen (puberty) | Male | Parody of the cartoon character Morty from Rick and Morty. Also used as son (Bobby), grandson or younger brother. |
| Nevaeh | 20s | Valley girl | Female | Hand model on Instagram, single and sometimes a store intern. Often brings up the topic of how her name is "Heaven" spelled backward. Sometimes goes by the name Sam Swanson. |
| Victor | 30s | Russian (often influenced by German) | Male | Mostly a side character (friend or neighbor) and sometimes a store or bank employee. |
| Josh | 30s | Deep, nasally voice | Male | Almost exclusively a bank employee. Has a characteristic way of saying "MAAAAAM!" |
| Louis F. Hampshire | 60-70 | New York / Jewish / Boston | Female | A variant of Edna, with a Boston accent. |
The following is a simplistic family tree to symbolize the (often used) relationship between the different characters.
| Edna | Edmund | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dixie | Jebediah | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chad | Nevaeh | Tyler | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
- NOTE: Daniel and Victor are mostly used as support characters, in the form of a friend, employee, or scammer.
Characteristics
Identity
Having received death threats amid other serious reactions after coming clean after a scam call, Kitboga maintains that it is essential to keep his identity a secret online.[9] As such, he has worn dark sunglasses since the beginning of his Twitch channel; now, however, he only wears them when actively scambaiting and as a running joke on his channel.
Records
Kitboga had scammers "Adam Smith" and "Alex" on the phone for 37 hours over several days with interventions of a few other scammers (bosses, co-workers, and rival scammers); he received over 1,500 callbacks which amounted to around 12.5 hours being wasted by the scammers.
See also
- Trojan.Clampi
- Jim Browning - online alias of an anonymous British grey-hat hacker and YouTube personality whose specialty is scambaiting
References
- "Twitch". Twitch. Retrieved 2020-02-09.
- "Kitboga". YouTube. Retrieved 2020-05-27.
- Lorenz, Taylor (2018-02-06). "This Twitch Streamer Is Avenging His Grandmother by Prank Calling Scam Artists". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2020-02-09.
- Rigg, Jamie (2018-07-30). "Making a living scamming the scammers". Engadget. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
- D'Anastasio, Cecilia. "This Twitch Streamer Gets Revenge On Tech Support Scammers". Kotaku. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
- Selk, Avi (2019-02-08). "Internet scammers are terrible. This troll is their nightmare". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
- Angry Tech Support Scammer VS Valley Girl, retrieved 2019-09-22
- Ward, Adam (2019-04-04). "Kitboga: The Internet star giving scammers a taste of their own medicine". www.ctvnews.ca. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
- Murdock, Jason (2018-05-22). ""From laughter to death threats": Meet Kitboga, the streamer exposing tech support scams". Newsweek. Retrieved 2019-09-22.