To catch a scammer: Kraken builds fake crypto account to ‘bait’ fraudsters

cointelegraph.com:

United States crypto exchange Kraken has provided a novel method for flagging nefarious wallets — building a fake crypto account on the exchange to “scam bait” bad actors.

Tweeting on May 10, popular streamer Kitboga — whose content revolves around annoying scammers— revealed that Kraken had built him a “custom environment” which he used to frustrate a scammer impersonating President Joe Biden, who he previously had a run-in with around a year ago.

This was so much fun!

In the accompanying video clip, Kitboga can be seen with around $450,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC) in his Kraken-built fake crypto account.

The scammer then sees the funds via video remote computer screen-sharing software that he supposedly duped Kitboga’s character into downloading, and gets very excited about a big potential payday.

However, the punchline comes when Kitboga, who is portraying an elderly woman in the video, incorrectly enters the scammer’s wallet address before sending over all of the funds. As a result, the scammer becomes highly infuriated and starts berating Kitboga with a slew of swear words.

Notably, the scammer appears to have supplied a Kraken-hosted BTC wallet address, which essentially enables the crypto exchange to identify them and flag their activity.

The idea behind this collaboration seems to have been made possible by Kraken's chief security officer Nick Percoco and Kitboga.

best crypto marketing i’ve seen on tiktok yet. Kraken sponsored a huge scam baiter account. They built him a custom environment so he could fuck with scammers pic.twitter.com/86p6FLA4g6

Kitboga has 1.2 million followers on Twitch and 3 million followers on YouTube. His content generally revolves around comedically wasting the time of call center scammers by