Jim Browning
speaker
364 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard 25 Jun
Jim Browning’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It was gold dust for me because they had records of all their calls. I could see it on which server they were using. And I could directly download these things because I had access to that scammer's supervisor's scammer's computer. So I managed to download nine months worth of calls, about 70,000 separate calls.
yeah oh it was so tempting that whenever you i mean i am watching live on the cctv i know the number that they're using uh the victims to call that day so i can call that number and i'll be speaking to somebody in a room that i can see on cctv hello yes sir yeah so what's all this about stop services then when they should be running i don't get it yeah
I don't always know who I'm speaking to, and sometimes if the room is full, it can be quite difficult to work out which agent. There may be 20, 30 agents in the room, and I can't always work out who I'm speaking with. And there's four cameras. Each corner of the room has got a camera. And what I do was actually invite the scammer onto a computer.
I had my desktop background set to a purple or a green color. And then what I would do is look around the cameras and look for that green screen or that purple screen. And then I knew, ah, right, there's the guy. That's who I'm talking to. And sometimes I had to do that just to work that out. And
The really, really tempting thing would be to say to the guy, hey, that's a nice Czech shirt you're wearing. Or, you know, stop playing Pac-Man whenever you're speaking to me. You know, can you stop doing that? But I couldn't give the game away. I couldn't be just as obvious as that. Although it was incredibly tempting to do that.
So I kind of figured out I was really on to something quite big at that stage. And I thought I would bring it to the attention of more mainstream media, specifically the BBC. I had never had contact with the BBC until that point. But Because I had personally tried to close down a lot of scam operations and been pretty unsuccessful about it.
So I have previously gone to the police in India to say, here's a scam call centre on your doorstep. Here's where they're located. I was able to get that sort of information, but nothing really ever came of it. And I thought, perhaps I'm going about this wrong. Perhaps what I really need is more mainstream media involved. So I got in touch with, really a general purpose BBC email address.
And before too long, I was reached out by a team called Panorama. Panorama are like a very long running documentary program where they cover all sorts of current affairs issues. But this particular team were interested anyway in scam phone calls. And as soon as I get in touch and said, look, this is what I have. Of course, that team were very, they wanted to work with me from that point.
The police did their raid. They picked up whatever computers they could. They went to the boss's home address. And he lived in like the most luxurious accommodation you could imagine, something like $6,000 a month to rent this place, which is completely unheard of if you're in Delhi where he was.
What I had expected was that this would be such an easy case for them, there would be no problem, and ultimately the guy who ran the thing would be locked up. But that was very far from the truth. And what actually happened was, number one, it took about a year for the trial to even come up. Then COVID kicked in, so it was delayed by another year. But eventually, whenever the case did go to trial,
the police never actually followed up on any of the evidence that was given to them or that they had collected. So they had scripts about scams from the boss's computer, but they didn't, for example, follow the money trail from the victims to the boss.
So they could very easily, if they had any kind of incentive to do so, they could have easily gone to PayPal and say, we need evidence about what happened with this particular PayPal account. They never asked for that. They never followed up on any of the thing. In fact, what they actually relied on was the one laptop that they managed to pick up.
And obviously, because the documentary had gone out, the YouTube video had gone out, all of the computers were immediately wiped before the police actually arrived. So they only really had one laptop to go on, and that wasn't enough for them. And any of the independent evidence of scams, the 70,000 phone calls, the video footage of the scams actually happening was never presented.
In fact, what they said was, well, that YouTube footage could have been done by AI or that YouTube footage could have been faked. And it looked like the judge just accepted that. So there was no pressure whatsoever to present anything which linked the boss to any of that scam victim money.
And that is just a travesty because I couldn't have handed it on a plate any more clearly to the police, or indeed the BBC could have handed the same evidence to the police. But the police never came to speak to me, never came to speak to the BBC. or follow up with any of the evidence that I presented in the video whatsoever. They just didn't bother.
And I can only imagine that's for one of two reasons. One is they're desperately incompetent, which I think is the more likely reason. they've been paid off because the guy who was in charge of this is the equivalent of a multimillionaire as a result of those scams. And unfortunately, in India, corruption is rife. So I don't know for sure, but I would imagine that's what happened.
Well, there you go.
Well, I mean, we've covered the moral one and I never have a problem with that one for the reasons I've just described. But equally, it's actually quite harrowing listening to victims actually getting scammed because there have been times that I have tried to intervene and I'll have gone as far as because the scammers typically are on the phone with their victims all the time to their cell phone.
And they're going out to buy gift cards or they're going out to a Bitcoin ATM. And the only way that I can try to get that scam stopped is if I can warn a neighbor. If I know they're going to a certain gift card store, I will call that store and say, there's a person about to come in. Here's their name. They're about to buy $500 worth of gift cards. Could you please stop them?
And it's incredibly difficult to watch when stores, for example, warn the victim, but they... Unfortunately, they trust the scammer more than the person in the store talking to them. And it can be very difficult to listen to that. I've had people go to a Bitcoin ATM the store manager has tapped them on the shoulder and said, you're being scammed.
Showing 341–360 of 364 · page 18 of 19
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