It can often seem as if phone and online scammers are beyond accountability. Often operating from abroad, where illegal activity is either tolerated or ignored, the organized criminal groups behind the scams that annoy and frustrate so many of us, have reaped billions in stolen gains from some of society’s most vulnerable.

But there is a small army of good guys fighting back.

Three of the world’s most popular “scambusters” — who have a combined following of more than 10 million across their social media platforms — joined forces with CBC’s Marketplace to create a fraud-fighting centre, using their unique skills to infiltrate criminal networks overseas, reroute 62 active scam call centres back to their operation and intercept fraudulent calls to stop scammers from accessing money from Canadian victims.

As for why Marketplace is involved in this:

Marketplace has helped bring some of those scams to light, through travels to Mumbai, exposing where many of the overseas criminal operations are based. The team has also taken hidden cameras inside tech support scam centre operations to reveal what’s happening and the victims scammers usually target. In 2022, the team exposed some of the Canadians with alleged financial connections to the overseas criminal operations running scam call centres.

So I’m looking forward to this crossover episode 😄

The episode should be available on this playlist within a day or so, considering the last one was uploaded 6 days ago: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeyJPHbRnGaZmzkCwy3-8ykUZm_8B9kKM

CBC Gem is also free with ads, relatively cheap without, if you want to support the CBC that way