What is scam baiting and how are others using it to help protect you from telephone schemes?

Rose Okumura is a voice actor and a content creator. Now she’s using her skills to turn to the tables on annoying telephone scammers.

It’s called scam baiting, which Collins English Dictionary defines as the “practice of pretending to fall for fraudulent online or telephone schemes in order to waste the time of the perpetrators.”

“My mom actually fell victim to a pop-up scam on her computer where it says, you know, you have a virus, call this number,” Okumura recalled. “And then for the low, low, amazing special rate of $499 you get a lifetime subscription to the service and none of it was real.”

So Okumura alerted her mother’s bank to stop the charge and called the scammer back.

“I decided to just keep the scammer on for as long as possible so that they didn’t have time to call anyone else,” she explained.

Since then, Okumura has become a full-blown internet vigilante. She says she’s proud to be a part of the growing scambaiting community online and will continue to waste scammers’ time and resources as much as she can.

“It feels good at the end of the day to bring that sort of awareness and happiness and comedy to different people,” Okumura said.