It’s Thursday morning in the Scam Hub – a darkened room at the BBC’s Pacific Quay studio in Glasgow full of glowing screens and people feverishly tapping away on laptops under the glare of TV cameras – and the atmosphere is tense. We’re eavesdropping on a call between a man in the UK and a scammer in Kolkata, India, who has managed to talk her way inside the unwitting scamee’s Amazon account.
Believing that he’s receiving a benevolent customer service call warning of rogue activity, the man has been conned into giving away a private passcode. Worse, the scammer has convinced him to download software to his phone granting remote access to his device, which could allow the harvesting of much more sensitive information including bank details.
Before things get that far, the man grows suspicious and hangs up. After the line clicks dead, we hear the scammer exclaim “Motherfucker” in Punjabi. Still inside the man’s Amazon account, she rapidly begins making a bunch of random expensive purchases including a luxury mattress for £1,000.
“They’re buying stuff out of spite right now,” Nick Stapleton, the lead interceptor, explains exasperatedly from behind three TV screens, four laptops and three mobile phones. “Scammers don’t benefit financially from this at all. They are just doing it, presumably, because they’re annoyed that he realised it was a scam.”
We are able to see and hear all of this happen because the scam interceptors have turned the remote access technology used by cyber-criminals against them. They have secretly tapped into the phone lines and screens of one of many operations in Kolkata’s Sector V – “the Silicon Valley of scam-call centres”, as Stapleton describes it. There, scammers working in teams of anywhere between five and 150 people pose as staff from companies that are household names in sectors from finance to tech and e-commerce.
This is just one of dozens of swindles that Stapleton, a reporter and investigative film-maker, and his colleagues will disrupt today. He dials the victim’s number, gleaned from the counter-hack. “I am a journalist, I work for the BBC,” Stapleton explains, in an assertive guy-off-the-TV voice. “I make a programme called Scam Interceptors for BBC One. We monitor the activity of scam-call centres, and we can see some of the numbers that they’re calling. That person that you were just talking to is a scammer. They have nothing to do with Amazon.”
The man buys Stapleton’s reassuring spiel, and promptly goes off to change his password, delete the spying software, and call his bank to try to stop the fraudulent transactions. But in the delicate confidence game that is out-talking silver-tongued, often highly experienced fraudsters, some members of the public don’t know who to believe. “We’re constantly trying to pull them out of the scammer’s world and into ours,” says producer Sherry Knight. “That’s where the battle lies.”
Presented by Rav Wilding, series one of Scam Interceptors was broadcast on weekday mornings on BBC One in spring 2022, and brought something unusually gripping and illuminating to a slot usually reserved for eccentrics cheerfully raking charity shops. It recently ran again in a primetime slot, and is up for a Bafta for best daytime show, with a second series airing this week.
The brainchild of executive producer Rowland Stone, Scam Interceptors was inspired by the 2020 Panorama investigation Spying on the Scammers, in which “ethical hacker” Jim Browning gave reporters CCTV footage from inside an Indian scam-call centre, allowing them to expose illegal practices. The idea with Scam Interceptors was to make something focused on the victims, with an added element of direct intervention. Browning – the alias of a software engineer from Northern Ireland, whose scam-baiting-focused YouTube channel has more than 4 million subscribers – came on board, and the show had, as Knight says, its “superhero”.
Browning protects his identity and whereabouts because “a lot of the time these call centres have links to very nasty people. Jim doesn’t want anyone knocking on his door,” says Stapleton.
Scam Interceptors monitors scammers who target people all over the world, with calls originating everywhere from the Philippines to Morocco. But Indian scammers targeting English-speaking countries make up the bulk of it and are, in many ways, a problem of the west’s own making. A customer backlash against the mass outsourcing of western call centres to India over the past 20 or so years has led to many being shut down. The unused infrastructure and residual skills and knowledge base have been exploited by criminal gangs.
The television team know where the scam-call centres are, and have tried reporting them to police in India, but there is rarely any meaningful response (they suspect local authorities are in on the act). In conditions of near impunity, the scammers’ techniques have been allowed to evolve, mature and become ever more insidious. Anyone could fall for them.
“They are horrifying emotional manipulators on a level that we’ve never really seen before,” says Stapleton. “You’re talking about an industry that’s been doing this now for two decades. They’re very good at what they do. They have been refining their script, coming up with new devious ways to take your money.”
This morning’s work is a drop in the ocean of the tens of thousands of calls the team try to interrupt over several weeks of filming. Scams can develop elaborately over minutes, hours, even days. Typically, the interceptors intervene with calls and texts. In the worst-case scenario, if huge sums of money are imminently at stake and they can’t reach someone and convince them they’re being scammed, Browning can try to break in and “nuke the call,” as Stapleton puts it – “the Hail Mary option”. Failing that, they’re left to watch as innocent people lose thousands of pounds, sometimes tens of thousands. Often the elderly and the vulnerable are worst affected, though scammers aren’t fussy and target everyone more or less at random.
There is a sense of frustration – futility, even – as to the limits of what the interceptors can achieve. Scamming is a problem that has grown massively since the pandemic, and which the powers that be seem unable to tackle. Ofcom research last year found that an estimated 40.8 million adults in the UK received a suspicious call or text in a three-month period. According to the National Crime Agency, fraud is the most commonly experienced crime in the UK, accounting for 40% of all crime. The last Annual Fraud Indicator report in 2017 put the cost at £190bn a year, but that figure is out of date and the current one will be much higher. “Say it was reported that around 40% of all crime in the UK was burglary or mugging,” says Stapleton, “there would be legislative action tomorrow. But for some reason, since this theft is remote, it’s allowed to carry on largely unhindered.”
The legal and data-protection headaches of making Scam Interceptors are massive, and material has to be selected and shaped for broadcast with care and invention (expect lots of shots of Stapleton and Wilding anxiously exclaiming “Pick up the phone! Take the call!” to the sound of dramatic music). Series one was padded out with fairly humdrum Crimewatch-style additional content – packages about how to spot somebody flogging stolen caravans, undercover investigations into fly tipping, that kind of thing – but there’ll be less of that in series two, and more from the Scam Hub. Real crime, happening in real time, on an industrial scale.
On another call, we listen to an involved ruse in which a smooth-talking scammer has conned a woman into agreeing to go to her bank to withdraw cash then post it to a fake address, under the pretence that she’d be helping thwart illegal practice by bank staff. The team ring her before she’s out the door and the scam is halted. On a different call, we hear a switched-on Scottish woman get wise and tell the babbling scammer to “haud yer wheesht!” before throwing him off the line. Later, the interceptors tap into a call centre where they find six well-developed scams in progress at once. They respond with a mass attack, bombarding the numbers with messages reading SCAM WARNING. The calls drop like flies.
Stapleton likes to think of what they do as old-school public service journalism. “We want to make people better equipped to deal with a scam call,” he says. “We want to give people the tools to be able to police themselves better.”
An Ofcom crackdown on voice over internet protocol (VoIP) calling, which lets scammers ring from spoof UK numbers, may help frustrate scammers’ efforts in the medium term. A government fraud strategy, which six months ago the home secretary, Suella Braverman, promised would be published “shortly”, remains to be seen. But such are the scammers’ slippery and creative powers of adaptation, the Scam Interceptors will continue to have their work cut out for them for much longer to come, reckons Stapleton. “They never give up,” he says. “They always find another way.”
Scam Interceptors airs Monday to Friday, 10am, BBC One.
