Breaking down the ingenious phone scam in Mark Rober's video in 14 steps

Few days ago, I wrote about Mark Rober's prank video and how advanced the scam was in his video.

In this article, I am going to break-down the scam in 14 steps technically, so that you can understand how it exactly works from start to finish.

Step 1:

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Step 14:

This is basically how the scammer performs his trick.
 

There are 3 main strategies that they use in this scam:
 

1) well-structured fake refund procedures

The whole scamming flow is convincing as it leads the victims into believing that they are actually talking to a member of the bank’s staff.
 

2) Requesting cash

They could have directly wire transferred money as the scammer had unrestricted access to the victims' accounts. However, that would make the scam traceable and would be flagged by the bank's fraud detection system. Therefore, luring the victim to send money in cash is one of the cleverest ways to work it.
 

3) Use Airbnb and hire a “mule”

When people decide to investigate who is behind the scam, they usually can only find the apartment’s landlord and the “mule” who was used as a fall guy while the scammers are still almost untouchable.