Ep. 253: “When the Bait Bites Back”

“What the Hack?” is DeleteMe’s true cybercrime podcast hosted by Beau Friedlander

Beau: You know how we caution you against sharing pictures from your personal life online?

Ethan: I realized something was happening. It was very straightforward. Somebody sent me a message directly through my Instagram, the messenger portion of the app, and they said, hey, I think somebody’s using your photos.

Beau: We’ve covered this story before. Versions of it. Presley Rhodes, an artist with a large following on a subscription-based creator platform–if it matters to you which one, you can probably guess already–and another about a retired Colonel from the military named Bryan Denny. But in those stories, we never categorically, 100% could say we found the culprit. In Bryan Denny’s case, his images were used in thousands of scams. This week, scammer beware. 

Ethan: They went from having no pictures and saying they had been dating me and they think it’s a scam and would like to talk to me further and understand if it was a scam and gave me their WhatsApp number.

Beau: So the good soldier we’re talking to this week put his skills to the test…

Ethan: One time I caught it. They must have had the, the VPN off, and it was only for, like, maybe an hour, and it was in a town in Nigeria. 

Beau: I’m Beau Friedlander, and this is What the Hack, the podcast that asks, in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? Ethan, oh my God, Ethan. Tell me what happened. Wait, first of all, Ethan, what’s your full name?

Ethan: Ethan Merritt.

Beau: Ethan Merritt? Like the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut?

Ethan: Happenchance, yeah.

Beau: So you’re not actually from the Merritt Parkway family?

Ethan: I am not from the Merrit Parkway family. No. I’m from another set of Merrits.

Beau: Every year, thousands of women fall in love with the same man. Is there anyone with the first initial “D” in your family? Is there any D. Merritts?

Ethan: There is not, no.

Beau: He’s handsome. He’s brave. He’s serving his country overseas maybe. Maybe he needs a little help getting home to you because something weird happened. It doesn’t have to be a man. It could be a woman too, but this person, they are legion. They’re everywhere. How does that happen? Well, that dude whose photos are scattered across 100s and sometimes 1000s of fake profiles; that’s how. They’re fake. On all sorts of platforms–from social media to dating apps….the guy is very real. Everything else is not. This week, that dude is Ethan Merritt, a colleague of mine. Ethan, welcome to What the Hack. So wait a second, here’s the deal… This scam, when I heard that you had been touched by this particular scam, I lit up because I haven’t, I have not had one of these in a while, and… All right, here’s the thing. They’re awful But they’re alsokind of awesome

Ethan: Yes. Yes, they are. They’re complicated, right? It’s a complicated scam, and it touches a lot of emotions for people. It really does.

Beau: Yeah. But like, let’s start with what happened, and then we can get into your emotions, their emotions, everyone’s emotions. But first, what happened?

Ethan: Yeah. So in 2018, I was, building a lot of Instagram presence for myself, just having a personal brand while I was in the military part-time. I enjoyed content creation. I enjoyed creating online. I had a very good time doing it, and I was very good at it at the time. And through that, you know, you’re obviously maybe less aware, especially in that era, less aware of what a scam could really entail with you, but also you’re just ignorant to it. You’re like, “You know, this wouldn’t really happen to me. I’m making creative content that’s fun.” And yeah, that’s, that’s what everyone thinks. I joined the military when I was 22 years old, and I was, at this point, I was about 25 or 26 when I was building out this personal brand online and promoting my life in the military as part of the personal brand and part of my story of what I was doing.

Beau: So what were you doing in the military? It sounds as like you weren’t just there for a two-year stint, you were doing something. What’s up?

Ethan: Yeah, I had joined the National Guard in the state of Pennsylvania, and I was an infantry officer. And I had been pretty young when I went to training and young on my deployment. I was probably the youngest officer on our deployment, and we did a year-long deployment to the Middle East, and we had came back and the events that preceded that we’re gonna talk about today are upon my return from this deployment.

Beau: So you actually were deployed in the Middle East as an officer? Where in the Middle East were you? Are you able to talk about that?

Ethan: Yeah, sure. Our primary location for our base operation and our unit was in Jordan. We spent time– I spent time in Jordan, I spent time in Kuwait, I spent time in UAE. So I got the world tour there, being a young platoon leader where I got to do several different missions.

Beau: And were you in active war situations when you were in the Middle East?

Ethan: I guess technically it would be active war situations. We didn’t see a lot of conflicts. We were just kind of stationary on standby as a quick reaction force to a lot of different regions as our primary mission. Training the Jordanian forces was also like our secondary mission while we were there.

Beau: Okay, so what was like a– What, what was a typical day in the life of Ethan Merritt in the Middle East like?

Ethan: Oh gosh, having lots of coffee, hanging out with the guys, probably being mostly bored in a lot of respects. Realistically, there’s a lot of hurry up and wait. I would say it really depended. Every few months we changed our mission, not by my initiation. It was really by kind of the needs of the military, right? And so most of my time was spent with these guys doing preparation on ranges for, you know, just like a regular range qual all the way to conducting like a live fire exercise training, which was good for us to have under our belt in case something were to happen. And then ending it, a lot of security gate guards, doing some light patrolling, and being a support system for security for another unit as well.

Beau: You began building your brand on social media while you were in the Middle East working in the military?

Ethan: It’s when I started to think about it, right? I had a time to, I won’t say time to myself, but time with not a lot of ability to do much else. I started thinking about what I wanted to do when I came home, right? That’s what everyone starts to think and ponder upon, especially around the holidays when you’re still there or when you’ve had just a big, long stint of things that you can’t really control. You start to think about what you wanna do when you come home, and I really started to look at a personal brand and a business kinda coinciding for myself.

Beau: How was that working in your head?

Ethan: Yeah, I was starting a production company while I was in grad school. So I was coming back to graduate school, and I wanted to do a production company where I can have a creative output, learn applications of what media can actually use within a business and within, things like marketing, of course, and kind of building this for myself when I came home. I was really adamant to build something for myself as a creative project. It was part of my thesis for my MBA program, and it was really something as an outlet for me. And so I wanted to come home, use some of my deployment funds to buy some gear, equipment, hire some people, and just realistically just get back some time that I had lost in something that I’m really passionate about because I had mixed feelings about my deployment and coming home and, you know, kind of like everything in between.

Beau: You began building this brand with an eye toward having that be useful in a career in marketing, I’m guessing. Is that right?

Ethan: Correct. Yeah, yeah. I went into my deployment thinking, starting an MBA program beforehand, that I was adamant to make money. I wanted to get into finance. And about halfway through my deployment, I realized I want to come back and make a career that I thoroughly enjoy. Some of the things I’d seen there were not– I’m not gonna say super detrimental in every part of the world, but there was areas of the world that I saw that I was like, “Man, we fundamentally have it so lucky here.” And I wanted to utilize every piece of my time when I came back accordingly after seeing some goods and bads of the rest of the world. And so I wanted to be able to create what I like within my work, but also have it be a functional part that can carry me into a career, not just a passion project. So that’s what I started to build and spent time learning how to video edit because I had a knack for it. I really enjoyed it. But then applying it to marketing was the longer-term vision to create, you know, a career that I can be proud of and something that is not just built around, you know, the foundation of I wanted to get into finance to make money.

Beau: Somebody did to you what has been done to so many good-looking military guys, actually specifically military guys. What do you know about the crime? How do you know how… Do you know about this crime? Did you know about it before it happened to you?

Ethan: Before this had happened to me, I had no idea about it. I didn’t know it was gonna happen. No context.

Beau: Okay, fair enough. So, what happened here is pretty simple. A scammer grabbed all Ethan’s pictures from his social media accounts and used them to open up a lot of accounts aimed at stealing money from women who were single and looking for love. So, Ethan, I’m always interested to hear how it started. Not how the scam started, but your realization that it was happening. 

Ethan: I realized something was happening. It was very straightforward. Somebody sent me a message directly through like my Instagram, the messenger portion of the app, and they said, “Hey, I think somebody’s using your photos.” And of course, I found that just not– I mean, I didn’t really take it too seriously. I said, “Well, you know what? That’s… Sure.” I don’t really even believe it, but I was like-

Beau: It’s Meta.

Ethan: Yeah, right. Right. So I didn’t take it too seriously, to be honest, at first. I thought, “Wow, that’s, that’s kinda humorous. Like I don’t think that’s real, but you know, we’re just gonna go with it.”

Beau: How did they know that your images were being used without your permission?

Ethan: They were finding me through searching my name or searching through more information to find me. And they had alluded to they’d been talking to me and they thought they were dating me. That was the start.

Beau: This person had been in a online relationship with a person they thought to be you. And from that first point of contact to the next one, how long was it?

Ethan: Maybe about a month.

Beau: Okay. So you’re like, “Okay, you know, things happen. That’s weird, but sorry that happened to you.” 

Ethan: So I thought, “You know what? Maybe this person could be lying to me. Maybe they just thought something was interesting or weird because maybe they didn’t get me on the phone or a video call.”

Beau: Where were they from?

Ethan: They were from the U.S. They were from a different state than where I lived, so it wasn’t somebody I would’ve ran into or known in my personal life.

Beau: Right, so someone from the U.S. gets in touch with you. They’ve been dating you unbeknownst to you, and you’re like, “Okay, well, that was weird.” And then you go on with your life, and a month later you get contacted again. Where’s this person getting– calling you from, getting you from?

Ethan: I get another person from the U.S., but within the same week I get about three people.

Beau: Three?

Ethan: Yeah. I get three people in one week.

Beau: All women?

Ethan: They were all women, yeah. Yep. And a few of them were, again, two I think were from America. One of them was from a different country. I can’t remember at that point where they were from, but three of them in about a week.

Beau: Wow, you’re a busy guy.

Ethan: Yeah, three long-distance girlfriends, you know. It’s a lot to juggle when you’re not involved in any of them.

Beau: Amazing. And so your communication with them, did you look any of them up and be like, “Huh, maybe we could date. You seem kinda cool,” or was it-

Ethan: Oh, of course I looked them up. Yeah, absolutely. I started to do my due diligence a little bit and be like, “Let’s see where this person is finding me, what they look like.” I started to look at some of the profiles. One profile had, like, no images, so I was like, that’s a little bit of a red flag of a situation. The other ones were people. I mean, there were people on there. But yeah I did loosely kind of conversate with these people because it was so early on. I was kind of having fun with it. Not to mislead them, but I didn’t take it very seriously, right? I was just like: Hey, this isn’t me. You know, great talking to you though, you know, like now, but this wasn’t me at all. And some people did not like that, and some people were okay and they walked away. But others, it was not quite a good conversation.

Beau: So we got four people who have dated you, and one of them didn’t have any images on their profile. That’s the one that interests me. Do you remember anything about the communication with the one who had no pictures?

Ethan: They went from having no pictures and saying they have been dating me and they think it’s a scam and would like to talk to me further and understand if it was a scam and gave me their WhatsApp number.

Beau: Phenomenal.

Ethan: I thought that was a little bit hairy

Beau: Hairy? That’s awesome. That was the scammer. That was definitely the scammer. All right, so, we’re now two weeks in. You’ve been contacted by four people. One of them’s a scammer. Ugh. And what happens next?

Ethan: I was looking through some of these profiles and one of the people within that first group, I said, “Hey, where did you find me?” They gave me a dating website, Plenty of Fish. They screenshot it and showed me pictures of me from my Instagram that were only a couple weeks earlier.

Beau: Hmm.

Ethan: That was one of them. And then-

Beau: And now Plenty of Fish just for… Now even I know this. I think I know this. Isn’t that more of a hookup site? A hookup app?

Ethan: I think so. It’s not like as co-located as like Tinder with like your locations. You can just kinda search people. I’m not entirely sure the depths of the like, you know-

Beau: The culture stuff, but it’s not like Bumble where you’re like, you’re actually trying to get a girlfriend or a boyfriend.

Ethan: Not that I know of, no.

Beau: I think that– ’cause like who would refer to the person they’re gonna marry as Plenty of Fish?

Ethan: Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Beau: Odd thing to say about someone you love. Okay, so you looked there and you… What happened when you went to Plenty of Fish and you looked at them?

Ethan: I looked at screenshots he had sent. So I was aware of not wanting to click on things they send me, so I said, “Send screenshots,” and they did. So that was a good sign that this person might be a real person that was maybe involved in something that was a romantic scam. And I started kind of adding up that I’m like, “Okay, I’m on some dating profile somewhere.” I hoped to God it wasn’t necessarily where I lived, ’cause this could cause my personal life some drama. And it wasn’t. This was in Europe.

Beau: Oh, interesting. Now which… But is this also Plenty of Fish or is this a different app?

Ethan: This is also Plenty of Fish. They were using it in…I believe they were saying I was in Germany and parts of the U.K. for work, the military side of work.

Beau: And were any of your pictures military in vibe?

Ethan: They were, yeah.

Beau: Did you see your profile actually? You saw screen grabs of your– screenshots of your actual profile?

Ethan: I saw the screenshots. I decided to look it up. Obviously not clicking on a link. I just looked it up on my desktop separate.

Beau: You found it.

Ethan: Yeah, I did.

Beau: And were you speaking in German to your potential girlfriends, or were you in English really being an American GI Joe?

Ethan: Yeah, in these profiles, I was an American GI Joe who was stationed there and trying to come back to Germany. Trying to come back is the key thing here as we divulge more of this information.

Beau: Uh-huh. Trying to come back. I didn’t even catch it ’cause I’m so fascinated by Plenty of Fish in Germany. Why would you be trying to come back to Germany? What’s wrong?

Ethan: Well, and that’s the part that doesn’t add up for– If anybody knows the military, you have a paycheck most of the time. You are not going to be stranded somewhere, and you are a part of a unit that realistically takes care of you, that they will figure out your logistics. So what this person was alluding to, the scammer was telling people, “I was deployed, and I’m out of money, and I’m stuck in a different country, and they need to send me some money so I can come back to Germany.” So I think they were targeting German women, older women typically, that maybe don’t have a partner anymore or maybe haven’t had a partner, and they were targeting them to try to get them to pay to fly me back to Germany to be with them.

Beau: The psychology there is brutal. So you’re in a flirtation, not you-you. The you that is not you that maybe got in touch with you and wanted to WhatsApp with you, that you, probably to spoof your phone number to further make it even more awesome a scam.

Ethan: Yes. Yeah. I found one person, so divulging into more people, there became, I wanna say maybe a total of 20 individuals that came to me eventually within about six months. But one of these people early on, I stayed in contact with as I found out that there was more people. And this one person from Germany was giving me as much information as they could. And it was juicy. I’m not gonna lie to you. It was– I was having them get more information as I found out more things because they were in contact with the scammer still. And I said, okay. Once I found out that there was more people to a point of, potentially I should be worried, I wanted to talk to one person who was gonna try to help me. That was my best entry point, right? I didn’t have another way to go about this very easily. And, it became very real when I heard about some of the amounts of money that were coming through. And so this one person was doing some undercover work for me, the real me, not just the fake me, communicating to the fake me to get as much viable information as possible.

Beau: What kind of money are we talking about here?

Ethan: Yeah. So this is almost heart-wrenching the amount of money that I heard about. And I can’t verify it. I did see a screenshot of this though, so I’m certain some transfer was real. But €20,000 was sent at one time. Like one payment of 20,000 was the most that I saw from one of these individuals that they sent.

Beau: So clearly you were also needing to not only get yourself back to Germany, but your motorcycle.

Ethan: Me, my motorcycle, everybody I know.

Beau: But seriously, what was the ruse? Like how did your mole get you good information?

Ethan: The mole provided me a substantially good amount of information. They were originally, they were upset at the scammer once they had talked to me, and they started to be mad at them and say, “I don’t think you’re real. I don’t think you’re real.” And I continued to talk to them. I said, “Hold on. Let’s put a pause on this, right? Let’s see if we can help you and help other people and not piss this person off ’cause maybe we can use them.” And they gave me a lot of information with multiple phone numbers they had through WhatsApp, maybe another platform as well, like Signal. I can’t remember if there was multiple. They gave me a Snapchat which they had used to communicate as well. They gave me a lot of Instagram profiles. Later, I looked up my name, and I was able to find about 70 or 80 profiles total across a few different platforms of myself either through a picture, through partial name, like my last name didn’t change, but the first name did. And this person gave me a ton of good information. I mean, I was very thankful that they did.

Beau: So there’s almost 100 people who’ve been affected by this at this point.

Ethan: Possibly, yeah. There could have been.

Beau: Or like at least have been, had contact with fake you.

Ethan: Yes. Yes. And through about, like I said, on Instagram, at least 50, 60 profiles single-handedly on there I found, and I started to look through and see if there’s any connections with other people, through my own profile, but I started doing it through a different profile myself to look through and I started to reach out to people within there that followed the fake accounts. Some of the fake accounts had thousands of followers, like-

Beau: Some of the fake Meritt, maybe D. Merritt-

Ethan: Yeah, exactly.

Beau: Eddie, whatever Merritt, they all had… It’s crazy. Some of them had a real following. And how old were they? Did you happen to clock the age of the profiles that had a lot of followers?

Ethan: One of the profiles was a year old. Most of them were about six months or less from the time of the first message.

Beau: And remind me again, what were the photos? What were the type of stuff you were posting that they were reusing?

Ethan: It was like stuff in uniform, stuff at trainings, stuff like I was doing a, like a broadening assignment as like a public affairs officer. And so I would post a lot of different types of photos, and then I would include myself in them ’cause I wanted to document the fun of what we’re doing as a unit. So I would have a variety of things. So I would always try to make sure to capture something I was getting the chance to do, you know, because I liked bragging about it. Like, I liked our unit, I liked what we were doing. We had some great, like super good leadership, like that I respected, that I wanted to promote as much as I could.

Beau: Well, and that is, and that vibe is attractive. So, good job. I mean, maybe a little too good, but good job. Now we have multiple victims. We have at least one person who has coughed up 20,000 euros. And I assume that the person that’s been helping you also was scammed out of some money.

Ethan: They were, yeah. A smaller amount. They said they had sent some money as well, assuming they are who they say they were.

Beau: It’s hard to believe, but I’ll ask you, do you think it’s possible that the person you were, your mole, your inside person, was a scammer?

Ethan: I don’t think this person was after speaking to them for as long as I did. I probably spoke to them on and off for probably a month, maybe six weeks,

Beau: And there was never a request for any money or anything like that?

Ethan: They were upset at me and said, “I need you to send some of the money back.” And I said, “I never received money.” And after that, they never asked me again. And they never– Once they found out this was a scam later, they never continued to try to reach back out, where some of these people did. Like, they really were romanticizing the relationship that we had to a fault. I was trying to be empathetic. As a young guy too, I was like, obviously I couldn’t believe somebody would have fallen for this, and the logical side of me just continued to kind of press and say like, “This is not me,” and I didn’t understand why you would have thought so. But the long play of what the scammers had done was way more thought-out than I had ever considered. So some of it was challenging. There were some people that I ended up having to block eventually, even though I had empathy. I had to block them because we were not dating, we were not in a relationship. I didn’t need them to possibly, you know, alter some parts of my personal life because of their emotional endeavors based on the scam.

Beau: I’ve asked you so many questions about what happened and the people who were involved, but I haven’t yet asked you how you felt about it.

Ethan: I was like, “Somebody’s using my photos.” That to me was, I’m like, “Well, that’s kinda cool. I mean, I’ll take it as a compliment.”

Beau: 100%. The little glint on your tooth, you know?

Ethan: Yeah, yeah. If that had happened one time and I walked away and that never happened again, I would’ve just had a chip on my shoulder. Not for very long, but I would’ve been like, “Oh, that was cool,” you know? But, but it doesn’t, you know, it divulged into so many layers of, like, it was a, and it was a personal headache for me eventually, know?

Beau: Oh, hell yeah!

Ethan: It became a serious problem.

Beau: It must have also felt not great.

Ethan: It started to feel very, very intrusive and I won’t say scary, but it started to feel that way. Like, like close. It was on the brink of scary because I think it was scary the mass amounts of things that they dug and found that they continued to use and to replicate over and over again. The ability to develop these fake profiles and do it so well and seamlessly, I started to think that there’s a team of people doing this. Because this was before AI, or at least AI as we know it. This was before a lot of capabilities that we have now. And, and so I started to see this as, “Oh, this might not go away, possibly ever,” because my images are now out there being repurposed, and I didn’t know how the infrastructure worked of these scammers and where they sell them to, where they give them out to, where they continue to use these and propagate this. And on a deeper level than that, it started to make me worried about my own security where I am, because on the one side, there’s scammers, and then on the other side, there’s people that now are mad at me, and I owe them money, and some serious amounts of money to some people that they might then try to also hunt down the real me potentially, which became a little bit of a concern, especially when you’re talking about somebody who’s in the military, who has a clearance, who’s done a mission overseas. Like I just came back from being overseas six months before. Are these threats from different nations or are these individual people that are just needing money? Which is the majority of scams, is people getting money, right? But where’s the line? And I started to really consider that this is like a serious problem outside of just a headache.

Beau: You’re not alone in having had this happen to you. Specifically, like honestly, like specifically military, good-looking, nice, like doing the right thing in the world, that guy. That guy gets used a lot in these scams. I think you’re right. I think that it was a team of people. It’s possible it wasn’t. It’s possible it was just some dude. I mean, we’d– in our episode with Paul Raphael, it was a barber in some remote village in Nigeria. That’s who was doing it.

Ethan: Interesting.

Beau: And they caught him. He got an Emmy for it, but yeah. So let’s just assume, in this case it sounds maybe like there was a group of people in the confraternities in Nigeria and South Africa. They have created these groups of people who make a lot of money scamming people through romance scenarios that wind up costing people their entire savings. When that happens, especially when it’s a lot of money, people get pissed off and they want that money back. And they are not all going to say, “Oh, I was scammed. It’s not this guy.” Someone is gonna say, “It’s this guy.” Now, did you ever feel like you were physically in danger or worry about it?

Ethan: Yes, I did. The idea that somebody is not going to… That the social engineering is so well done that these people then really are looking to figure out where I’m actually gonna live, where I do live, where I do reside, that they’re not gonna believe me. Which is exactly what happened. I had somebody tell me that they’re like, “I don’t believe you.” And they wanted to– They were pretty persistent on that. And that was pretty eye-opening. I had one person tell me that they were going to try to find my house that lived in America, one person. I was, I would say being, at that time being a single guy with necessary protections at my house, I can’t say that it was the most frightening thing that’s ever happened in my life, but it was far from the most comfortable feeling in the world to have somebody make that threat. One of the people that, you know, really didn’t believe me with the larger amounts of money said, “I’m gonna contact your government. Like I’m gonna reach out to the FBI, and get you arrested for this.” I told that person, I said, “Look, I wish I had 20,000 euros from you.” Not from you specifically, but I said, “I wish I had a spare 20,000 euros.” I would’ve just sent it back politely if I would need to. But if I had that in my bank account, I’d be pretty happy. But the reality of that settled in, you know, that somebody from outside of our country was then threatening to contact the government, which was, I would say the word’s fine, but not really. I had a clearance and I was still working in the military, right? And I was a little concerned about my clearance getting investigated, just honestly having more of a headache knowing I’m obviously innocent, but just wondering what could happen if, let’s say, 100 people did that instead of just one. You know, who’s gonna come to my front-

Beau: You would get flagged as a scam victim. But here’s the thing, is there’s one thing that you should do, if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re like, “I am also a good-looking guy who was in the military and had a web presence that was used against me, against others, not me. What should I do?” You should tell the authorities, and you should tell, if you’re in the military, you should tell your CO, and you should do all the stuff because everybody needs to know. And because as Supreme Court Justice Brandeis once said, you know, light is the best disinfectant. You know, we cast light on things. We don’t hide things. We say what’s going on. And the best way to stop being scammed is to raise your hand and say, “Is this a scam?” But don’t ask me ’cause I’ll always say yes, and sometimes it’s not, and then you don’t pay your bill and you get a fine. Where are you in the process now? This is… Are we years later? Are we months later? ‘Cause I’m sure people are wondering, like you’ve said, you’ve indicated a few times it wasn’t today. So where are we now? How many years are we away from the last instance of this happening to you?

Ethan: This stopped in… 2020 is when this stopped. And yeah, actually right before COVID had stopped, and I had a trickle of a couple accounts still floating around by that point. But like you had said, I actually contacted the authorities. When somebody made that threat towards me with the authorities, I said, “You know what? Maybe it’s time I do that right now, in case this is a real thing.” So I contacted some authorities locally to put it on their radar. But yeah, we did some deep digging and I was able to get the scammer’s information, down to where they lived.

Beau: You are a rock star. Everyone now, like, just sit with that. Ooh. Ethan Merritt, you figured out who the scammer was.

Ethan: I did.

Beau: How? Did you use their against them?

Ethan: Absolutely. I used the mole. I used the mole and the mole’s information as a starting point, and then I set up a fake account. I catfished them. I catfished them. I set up a fake account on Instagram. I’d used my face in another account to try to get them to give me more information about needing more pictures of me. And I was talking to them, asking if I could buy some and that I could work with them.

Beau: Shut the door. So you posed as a scammer to the scammer.

Ethan: I posed as a scammer to the scammer and verified some of the information that I had from the mole and some of the information that I got from there, and then some of it was the same. So I got a list of numbers, Snapchats, and I told that person, I’m like, “Let me Snapchat you and let me talk to you.” And so I continued to talk to them as if I was a scammer. All the while, I was looking at where the Snapchat was on this fake account and seeing… I was trying to watch the location map of it. It wasn’t private, and it was showing up in Virginia. It was showing at a hospital there, and it kept showing up there, and then it would just be gone as if they were on– as if they were not online. But it was consistently at this hospital. I really started to think it was a worker there just, like, screwing off or doing whatever, or somebody at the hospital.

Beau: Or like the Joker in some lost episode of Batman.

Ethan: Like, right, exactly. And so, like, I called that hospital. I talked to the person that was the director. I said, “I don’t know how much you know about your employees,” you know. I’m like, “I just wanna know if there’s somebody who’s…”

Beau: But this is coming from in your building.

Ethan: Yep. Yep. And they did a little bit of… They looked and asked their employees and stuff and they’re like: “Look, we don’t have anything, but we’ll let you know if something comes up.” One time I caught it. They must have had the VPN off, and it was only for, like, maybe an hour, and it was in a town in Nigeria. So sure enough. It was in a town, what I would guess on a map about 20, 30 minutes away from a town. This little, a street of like six houses. It was one of the houses specifically right there. And with a little help with my roommate, me and him were pretty invested in this. We found the exact house, got the IP address. We found a lot of information.

Beau: And are you guys geo-guessers or did you just figure it out?

Ethan: We figured it out. Yeah

Beau: Wow. So you found the exact house in this little village in Nigeria. And it breaks my heart on some level because I know a lot of these scammers are like…. 100 bucks to them is a life-changing amount of money. But $20,000 is an unnecessary amount of money, and it’s not like they’re only scamming one person. And so it goes, and on and on. What did you do when you found that little place in Nigeria?

Ethan: Well, I did two things. I did take all this information. I gave it to the authorities that I had here that I’d started working with, which is obviously the best case I can do. And then I had some fun with it. I had a little bit of fun with it for a little bit of time. 

Beau: So I gotta hear it. What happened?

Ethan: My roommate and I, we set up a tool. He was a little more tech-savvy than I am. We set up a tool that was going to kinda unleash hell on them with messages through Snapchat. And it was gonna just continue to bombard their Snapchat with a ton of notifications.

Beau: Oh, you bombed him. You bombed him.

Ethan: We bombed them. We found a way to bomb them. And then before that, just to make sure that they knew that I was at least fairly serious about it, I called them, and I called them directly on the fake accounts, and I said, “I know where you live.” I showed them on a map on my computer. I showed them their IP address. I showed them their name. I scanned it on a call on Snapchat video and showed them all this, and I said, I said, “I just want you to know that this is gonna be sent over to the authorities and our government, just so you know.” And then we proceeded to bomb them until that account was gonna be just not working anymore. So that’s how we had a little bit of fun with them.

Beau: Ethan, did you have their email address by any chance?

Ethan: I did have their email address at the time, or at least some email that they were using, yes.

Beau: Did you email-bomb them?

Ethan: Oh, we did that as well. Yeah, we tried our best with what we could do, being young guys just sitting in an apartment.

Beau: No. If you’ve ever been… Now, I have been. People love doing this to me. I have been email-bombed in the service of a pizza scam. And then what it’ll look like if you’re listening is you can, this can happen to you too. You’ll start getting a real number of emails, like 2,000 a minute. And the reason you’re getting those is because you’re being opted into opt-in emails that have bad, broken APIs all over the world. And what happens is while you’re getting all those emails, the transaction alert on your card is also getting dumped in there and you’re not seeing it because you’re getting 2,000 emails a minute. So if you ever see that you are getting a lot of emails all at once or a lot of messages on social, put down whatever device you’re using, pick up a different device, and check your bank accounts ’cause that’s what’s happening. That is almost for sure what’s happening. And with that, Ethan, before we end, I have to ask you, did you bomb them so that you could take all the money back? Did you get the money back?

Ethan: Oh my gosh, no. I wish. I wish I could have taken the money back. I wish I could have given it to people, but unfortunately, that’s not something I could do.

Beau: Understood. Ethan Merritt, thank you so much for sharing your story this week with us. I mean, I love a good scam story, and yours was epic.

Ethan: Thank you. You’re welcome for the story. Hopefully it was entertaining in the right way, but educational for people to understand, if they ever get themselves stuck in a similar situation.

Beau: 100%. Okay, parting shot. Any advice you would have for someone else who finds themself all over the internet wooing people they’ve never met?

Ethan: I would say that at the end of the day, I still have a lot of empathy for human beings, including scammers because they are trying to make a living somehow, some way. There’s empathy to be had in the world, but at the end of the day, you are the only person that can be in charge of taking care of yourself and protecting yourself from instances that happen. So do your due diligence on it. Do your research on it. That’s what I’d give away as parting words

Beau: Thank you, Ethan. And now it’s time for the Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. Now, for absolutely everyone listening to this episode, you need to know about email and message bombing. It’s pretty simple. You’re gonna get a massive flood of notifications, and I mean, like, a lot. The reason they’re doing this is to- who are they? The attackers. Fine. The reason this is happening: noise. It’s just a way to bury your transaction alerts, assuming you have them. So if you see a big flood of messages, emails, whatever, go immediately to your financial accounts and almost guaranteed one of them is getting attacked. Now, for service members and creators, you gotta protect your digital footprint as much as possible. Scammers love using photos of you being attractive, right? Report it immediately when you find out to the platforms, to the police. Alert your, really important, alert your CO or your employer, wherever you happen to be, your security officer, whatever it is. Make sure you get ahead of the narrative because it really can be a pain in the butt if you don’t. Now, for online daters, how do you spot a romance scam? The stranded ruse is definitely way up there. “I’m on my way home. Oops, lost my credit card. Oops, can you just buy a ticket for me?” Or, “Oops, better yet, send me some money.” You need screenshots, you need links, you need real-time video, and none of that is going to necessarily be foolproof in this day of AI and deepfakes. Be careful. Be creative. Ask a lot of questions. Now, final shot here is something that Adam Levin used to say all the time in the previous incarnation of this show, which is the best protector in this land of cyber risk is yourself. Be your own best guardian. Pay attention to all of you various versions and presences online and be a good steward, because you’ll be glad you did in the end. Now, stay safe out there and we’ll see you next week. If you have a story you wanna share with us, definitely reach out. We wanna hear from you. This episode of What the Hack was produced by me and Andrew Steven who also did the editing. What the Hack is a production of DeleteMe, which was picked by the New York Times’ Wirecutter as the #1 personal information removal service. You should be using it already. If you’re not and you want to, well, you can. Here’s what to do. Go to joindeleteme.com/wth. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth and get 20% off. I kid you not, 20%. 20% off. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth. Now stay safe out there. See you around.

Learn More:

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