Using My Python Skills To Punish Credit Card Scammers

Here we go again, another day, another scammer. This time a scammer decided to use a live payment processor to test validity of cards to scam. Not very smart and he'll pay because of it.

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[EngineerMan]

Hello friends, hope you're enjoying the video. Just wanted to address a few questions that I've been seeing a lot in the comments. #1. I'm not a hacker, this isn't a hacking video, and I didn't hack anything. I did not do anything that a normal person (victim or not) couldn't have done. No hacks, no exploits, no vulnerabilities, no break-ins. Every action I took was publicly available to me and everyone else that went to that scam site. #2. For those concerned that the scammer is using a stolen card to pay the bill, don't worry too much about that. Consumers have zero liability for fraudulent use of their card. Banks will issue charge backs to recoup their money and the burden will be on the processor and thus on the scammer. Additionally, getting an account with a payment gateway cannot be done anonymously and gateways use a bank account to forward the proceeds to and withdraw the charges, if necessary. So either the scammer gave their real information because they are operating in a country that is lax on the rules and is legally on the hook for the charges, or the processor is in on the scam as well. Regardless of which case it is, nothing bad is coming to any victims. #3. My efforts are not pointless. At the time of this writing, this site as well as every scam site in the long list of scam messages on my phone is offline now. Although I seriously doubt it was what I did that caused that, I can only hope it helped a little.

[_seventh_son]

the most impressive part of this video was seeing how he added single quotes and colons to that whole dictionary at once

[alekosimba]

-Me, who has 0 programming skills, 0 Python Knowledge: "Yeah good idea, do that"

[AKSKJDI]

Literally laughed my ass off when he said "Just the infinite loop isn't fast enough, let's have 50 threads running this simultaneously"

[ReverendBishop]

I work in fraud and you've fulfilled my most common work daydream. I've never laughed so hard and maniacally before, thank you

[tednesham]

in case anyone was wondering if each REFID decline cost $0.05. The actual amount his final script charged the scammer is $2228.3 USD

[zekihvh]

You should've made a "loss counter" which would add 0.05 for every successful response and print that data on screen to display how much he'll be charged.

[Majorskillissue]

Been learning python for 3 days now. I’m glad that I was able to understand a quarter of what he was doing, or at least understand parts of the code. Still got a lot to learn 👍

[ocsanik]

Alt Title: Making the scammer pay for an actual PS5 in decline fees.

[daidcz]

This should be a compulsory exercise for CS undergrad students.

[christopherbuckley]

I've got zero experience with python, but lots with other languages. I was amazed at how simple and easy to understand the code and what you were doing. Can't wait to dig into this stuff more!!!

[numberiforgot]

Dude didn’t stop at the infinite loop; he added 50 threads a loop. That’s some serious punishment.

[baldcoder_]

Me: "cool, an infinite loop left overnight to punish the scammer"
Engineer Man: "It's not going fast enough. Let's use threads"
Me: "Time to hit subscribe"

[MrDHGFIU]

Imagine creating a scamming website only to lose $3 every second.

[mikembley]

After watching i couldn't help shake the feeling that the script that the form was submitting to could have just been a phoney response made by the scammer to simulate a decline, so that the victim thinks theres something wrong with the card, possibly making the victim either use another card or just causing the victim to reach a "dead end" so they leave the site thinking their card wouldn't work in time, when in fact the scammer has already stored their CC credentials.

[SeekNKnow]

You should just let it run for 10 hours and stream it. When I'm feeling down, I can come to the channel and just smile for a while. 😊

[petermckellar]

I am just learning Python and the big thing from this video was the way you formatted all that data simultaneously to make a Dictionary. Got out the manual and figured out how to do that myself. That was the big takeaway for me. Thanks.

[bryannguyen]

As a former CS student who has now switched majors, I'm just shocked that you can type a comma on multiple lines at the same time...

[Agnostic]

A few things I'd do differently: You can right-click on the request and copy it as a ready request that can be sent directly in a few different formats - that would save time getting it right.
Then, I would send asynchronous requests, you don't have to wait for the response this way, so you can really pound in those requests. I'd also aim to use a proxy just in case. Javascript has a better support for asynchronous requests, but it can be done in Python as well. These are just some technicalities in the end though. Your approach has done the deed just as well :)

[CheatGang]

That’s 10, 000$+ in damage with some lines of code...