Web Video / Kitboga

"Do not redeem! Do not redeem! DO NOT REDEEM!"^note But honey, I'm doing this for you. This is how you get the money.

Kitboga is a scambaiter and occasional PC game streamer on Twitch. His goal is to spread awareness of the various phone scams out there, that prey upon innocent people that are too easily-manipulated into their schemes.

In other words, he prank calls scammers to try and go along with them, while trying to waste as much of their time as possible in the process. The most common scam seen are the infamous "tech support scams" — where users are coerced into calling (or, in many cases, cold called by) a fake tech support hotline (most commonly an Operator from India) that tries to convince the user that their computer is compromised and requires an expensive software subscription in order to fix it. Or it's the IRS trying to claim you owe them, or trying to give you a fake government grant. Or, in latter installments, most commonly the "refund" scam, in which the caller claims to be with a company that's going out of business and is giving you a refund. They then pretend to transfer too much money into your bank account and claim that either a wire transfer or gift cards are needed to send it back.

Kitboga is known for using various characters in his calls, which can range from a sweet old lady, a man from the Deep South, a Dumb Blonde wannabe Instagram model, a vaguely Eastern European person, to an anxious teenager that has a relative who does weird science experiments.

He streams on Twitch, but also has a YouTube channel where condensed videos are posted. In 2021, he began a new YouTube channel called "More Kitboga" in which certain full calls can now be seen on YouTube. Not long after this, another new channel was posted called "Kitboga Highlights" in which he posts brief highlights of memorable moments from calls, sometimes even before a more extensive clip is posted to YouTube. Some fans have quipped that this channel should be called "Less Kitboga." In July 2021, it was announced that G4TV had signed Kitboga for an animated series featuring some of his most memorable scambaiting calls. In February 2022, he released a first look at the series, Baited, on his YouTube channel, featuring one of his most popular calls in which he pretended to buy hot dogs using the gift cards that scammers wanted. A podcast is also now available.

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DO NOT REDEEM! DO NOT REDEEM THE TROPES LIST:

• 20% More Awesome: On a stream dealing with fake puppy breeding scams, one of the storefronts featured the supposed results of recent health checks for each puppy, which was always either 100% or 99.9%. The scammer couldn't explain what exactly that's supposed to mean.
• 419 Scam: Usually not the focus of phone scams, though he has encountered a few. One incredibly barebones example is the "Cash Flip" scam, in which a service to multiply money is advertised via social media platforms such as Instagram. Sometimes as a form of meta-humor, the characters have sometimes brought up Nigerian princes promising wealth.
• 555: In "Scammer Wastes Entire Day Expecting My $2,000," a popup supposedly appears on Kitboga's computer with a 555 number that connects to Daniel the scammer for supposed free virus cleaning.
• Accidental Misnaming: In "Do Not Cut the Cards," Kitboga's character, Dawn Dewitt ("Granny Edna") often forgets the name of the scammer, Kathleen. She calls her at least a dozen different incorrect names, including, but not limited to, Candice, Kristin, Kelly, Cindy, Catalina and Rachel. At one point, she even seems to think that she's received a call from "Krispy Kreme," possibly offering a promotion on donuts.
• Acme Products: It’s not uncommon to find a call centre that advertises support for a ridiculously wide range of products, even if the core of the scam pretty much remains the same. For one example, during airline scams, even though they often advertise as representing a specific company, the scammer will often begin by asking the victim what airline they are calling.
• Actually Pretty Funny: On one stream, after revealing, Kit stuck around and told jokes to the scammer. The scammer had a pretty quick response to one, which Kit laughed at and admitted was pretty clever.^note The scammer later admitted he was scamming because of financial problems, sat in on another scambait with Kit, and even asked Kit to waste his supervisor's time!
  Kit: Is your name wi-fi? Because I'm feeling a connection here.
  Scammer: No.
  Kit: Oh, okay.
  Scammer: I'm not the wi-fi, I'm the hotspot.
  Kit: [Beat] Oh, oh! Are you saying that— *laughs* Wow, you know what? That's not a bad one! Wow. You're quicker on your feet than I expected.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: "Scamming a Scammer With Rogue AI - He Lost His Bank" features the introduction of Western Amber, an 'AI' character developed by an old woman to act as a housekeeper. As the title of the video hints at, it's not exactly a stable AI, completely ignoring the requests of Kitboga's character and the scammer of the moment and often doing the exact opposite, offering to help the scammer and at times speaking in a distorted voice. ^note  The character was born completely by chance after an off-hand joke. Kit expected the scammer to hang up right away, but surprising even him, he didn't, leading him to double down on the joke even further. Western Amber was originally the name given to an actual AI developed by Kit which is used to try to waste scammer time or get bank accounts from them automatically.
  Western Amber: Do you believe in God?
  Edna: Yes I do!
  Western Amber: I AM GOD
• American Gothic Couple: One of his green-screened backgrounds has this, with Nevaeh as the daughter and himself as the father.
• Angrish: Many of the scammers are reduced to outright angrish after Kitboga does stuff like redeeming the gift card codes he was supposedly going to give them before their very eyes.
• Argument of Contradictions:
  • This is the typical endpoint of any call involving the "refund" scam in which Kitboga pretends to redeem the gift card codes if the scammer isn't immediately reduced to the angrish described above. Kit will claim that he has just given them the money back and they will reply that no, he didn't, that he was actually redeeming the money in his own account. Of course, the truth of the matter is that there never were any actual gift cards and the Google Play Store in which he "redeems" the cards is a fake one that he created. He and the scammer will either argue back and forth until either the scammer descends into angrish or they hang up, having realized they just blew hours of their time with nothing to show for it.
  • This also tends to be the result of any call in which Kitboga puts one or more other scammers on the line while already scambaiting someone. They will each argue with each other, each claiming repeatedly that the other people on the online are scammers but they, of course, aren't.
  • In "Scammer Smashes Phone After Losing $3,000," when the scammer tries to insist that Kitboga typed 5000 into the "refund portal" instead 500, Kitboga insists vehemently and repeatedly that "nobody typed 5000."
• Asshole Victim: The scammers themselves. Their entire business model is centered around exploiting the fear and good will of senior citizens. They ultimately have nothing but greed to blame for getting roped into wasting hours on obnoxious prank calls.
• Bad "Bad Acting": As Kit himself points out, this is practically written into the script of the standard "refund" scam. The scammer will claim to be giving the victim a refund, then pretend to have either "accidentally" added an extra digit (usually a 0) onto the end and having transferred way too much money, or claim that it was the victim who did this. Then they go into full-on panic, acting like they can't believe what just happened and claiming that the victim has to give them back the extra money (usually via gift cards) ASAP or they're going to lose their job.
• Battle Rapping: In this video, Kitboga as Viktor manages to get a scammer boss to engage in a rap battle with him. The scammer claims that it's a tie, despite barely managing to rhyme and losing track of the beat.
• Because I Said So: This is a common scammer response whenever Kitboga presses them on a particular point of ridiculousness with their scam and they're unable to come up with a reasonable response. For example, in "Scammer Wants $1000s in Extortion Scam," Kitboga suggests simply asking the bank for a manila envelope instead of getting one from a convenience store like the scammer wants. The scammer sounds like a broken record saying "no" and when Kitboga asks why not...
  Kitboga: It'll save time.
  Scammer: Because you have to follow my instructions, that's why.
• Berserk Button: The usually calm and friendly Kit has a handful of things that will put him into Tranquil Fury mode:
  • As mentioned under Real Men Love Jesus, scammers who try to exploit a victim's religion as part of their scam.
  • Scammers who threaten physical violence or arrest if you fail to pay.
  • In general, though the general incompetence of scammers is mostly Played for Laughs, Kit becomes far more serious when he realises that someone on the phone is really good at their job. Those that take the time to befriend the victim, or go through the extra effort to make the scam seem convincing often fall into this category.
  • It has only happened three times, but a scammer threatening suicide will IMMEDIATELY make Kit break character and give them the talking down of a lifetime.
  • Whenever scammers directly insult, threaten or even proposition Kit’s Cloud Cuckoo Lander characters, the character will immediately drop their facade for just long enough to give the scammer a good chewing out for their behaviour, with Kit remaining expertly in-character all the while.
    • In "Crazy IRS Scammer Threatens To Kill Old Lady Over $200" Kit immediately broke character out of sheer disgust and anger because of one sickening scammer having immediately resorted to using death threats and scare tactics to try and intimidate what he thought was an old woman into giving him money. Even as he was scolding and chastising the admitted scammer, they continued to cackle shamelessly in response; Kit even mentioned he had to step away for a minute after the call ended, clearly having been shaken up by the call.
  • For the scammers, it's when Kitboga reveals to them, when he "redeems" the fake Google Play cards in front of them (the scammers want the codes so they can redeem the cards themselves) or when he pretends to be another scammer.
  • Kitboga absolutely hates scammers that are incapable of even basic improvisation, especially if they insist on repeating a portion of their script over and over while ignoring any idea Kit gives them.
    • Usually related to this is, during refund scams, when a scammer who has pretended to give Kit an excess amount of money threatens to drain his bank account if he doesn't comply with paying him back. Simply because it contradicts the entire premise of the scam (if the scammer can take all the money out of the account, why can't they take back just the money that they're owed?), and because pointing that out usually turns the scammer into a Broken Record.
    • A minor one that's also part of this is when scammers get angry or impatient when dealing with fairly normal distractions or misunderstandings that they would be highly likely to deal with in genuine calls, or in response to simple questions that any reasonable person would likely ask, likening it to the scammer whining just because stealing money from people isn't as quick or easy as they want it to be.
  • Another minor one, more of an irritation really, is any time the refund scammers ask him to fill out their fake "refund form." He considers it a boring and unnecessary part of the process and therefore especially in latter installments will either refuse outright or demand that they fill it out. He eventually got so tired of it that he decided to troll the scammers by creating a plugin which causes the form to display seemingly endless ridiculous questions, i.e. "RAM (Memory Size)," "Favorite Ride at Disneyland," etc. etc.
• Blatant Lies: Just about everything the scammers do qualify. From claiming to be from Microsoft or even the Internal Revenue Service, they go to great lengths to make themselves believable.
• Booby Trap: His virtual machine is filled with custom-coded gags intended to waste the scammer's time when they are connected, including versions of common Windows applications that do not work 100% as expected, and the legendary "Nudes" folder.
  Kitboga: I don't know if it's too much too soon. Like, I have taken quite a few ... [scammer clicks Extra Large Icons mode to see the thumbnails, awkward Beat] [...] These are my mole rats.
  • He also has a fake online bank, now used primarily for the "refund" scams. It too has some design decisions that are designed to frustrate the user. Among these are an automatic logout if nothing is done for a certain amount of time with a short timer, as well as an overlay that it makes it more challenging for them to perform their standard trick of editing the HTML to fake a balance.
  • Within the "Nudes" folder is a sub-folder named "Boobies." Within this is pictures of, well, take a guess: blue-footed boobies.
  • Any attempt to use Google to search for something instead results in getting the seventh page of Bing's results, which confuses scammers searching for stuff such as a demo bank site.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Kit sometimes ends his videos with "Happy painting, god bless," which is a shortening of Bob Ross's "From all of us here, I want to wish you happy painting and God bless, my friends," from The Joy of Painting.
• Bothering by the Book: The premise of scambaiting in general. If one tips off the scammer that they're aware of what's going on, the scammer will just move on to someone else. So, Kit poses as someone who will cluelessly go along with the scam, but will pepper in delays, misunderstandings, and little annoyances to waste the scammer's time while making the experience as miserable for them as possible.
• Character Level: A Running Gag treats the scammer's frequent claims that they are technicians of a certain level as this. This is based on the multi-tier tech support system some legitimate providers use to delegate tasks based on their severity, though in a highly exaggerated form; the scammers often claim to be 'level 7' or 'level 9' technicians, whereas actual tech support tiers rarely go beyond 3 or 4 levels, and most certainly would not transfer high-level technicians to perform basic virus cleanups. The fake Syskey application references this by turning into a "Microsoft Certified Login Terminal" that has level options that skip right to 9: clicking that changes the Microsoft logo to a GIF of a cat using a laptop.◊
• Chewing the Scenery: The refund scams, which ask the scammers to react with horror when they "accidentally" send the victim too much money, frequently involve this.
• Chroma Key: He uses this to show himself in front of the computer, or in various other settings such as a store hawking things like "Senior Perms $9.99" and Google Play gift cards, or a student in a class.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Scammers often (though not always) angrily curse at Kit when they discover that he's been stringing them along and wasting their time.
• Cool Shades: He always wears sunglasses; initially, it was because he was concerned that people would recognize him. They eventually stuck for Rule of Cool.
  • And then in March 2019, as a charity incentive ... he finally took them off! He's since taken to not wearing them during his introduction.
  • He also took them off for a a video in which he calls out TikTok for allowing videos purporting to be footage of the Russian-Ukraine war that are actually just clips from video games or air shows, in some cases encouraging people to make donations to Bitcoin addresses and such that aren't actually connected with Ukraine.
• The Comically Serious: A lot of his humour comes from the scammers trying to get through their scripts no matter what silliness Kit tries to throw at them. The fact that the scammers often only have very basic knowledge at best of the topics they are supposed to be adept at only adds to it.
• Complexity Addiction: The schemes Kit faces usually go by the assumption that companies would go through ridiculously roundabout ways of performing basic customer service tasks. The biggest example are refund scams. Just about every company on the planet can offer refunds instantly by simply reversing the original transaction, and any mistakes made in overpaying the refund can be corrected before the reversed transaction clears the company’s bank account. The scammers would much rather connect directly to the customer's computer, log in to their bank, and somehow transfer the money directly between accounts. A Running Gag is to ask the scammer to take the Occam's Razor route before attempting to hang up.
  Kitboga: Can you imagine the overhead if American Airlines had a call center where they connected to each one of their customers' computers to personally book a flight for them?
• Con Man: The scammers, of course. Of note, most of the scams don't involve any sophisticated computer hacking but simply persuading the mark to send them money under false pretenses.
• Consummate Liar: While many of the scammers are lame at best, every once in a while Kit encounters one who is actually good, seeming to lie as easily as they breathe air. Even if what they're saying makes no sense, they still say it with perfect ease, even as Kit tries to put them through increasinagly convoluted scenarios and questioning. One good example is the scammer from "The Craziest Scammer I've Ever Called," who spins an increasingly elaborate story about being a billionaire, yet somehow being in jail, having every single of one of his assets seized, and nobody actually knowing about him being a billionaire.
• Control Freak: Many of the less pleasant scammers turn out to be these, often getting very annoyed or upset if the victim makes even a minor deviation from their script. Kit points out that this is one of the telltale signs of a scammer: since they make most of their pay from commission, any time wasted could be hurting their paycheck quite significantly. Genuine tech support professionals with a guaranteed salary would never be so eager to declare that a customer is wasting their time.
• Cringe Comedy: Kit feels the calls are at their funniest when a scammer is forced out of their scripted comfort zone and is forced to improvise in response to his antics.
• Culture Clash: This does pop up occasionally, with scammers not understanding Kit's cultural references or approach topics of discussion in ways that would feel at odds with their frequent claims to be born and raised US citizens.
  • A common insult for scammers to employ is to question Kit's literacy. In India, the national literacy rate is around 80% with disparities generally being along urban/rural lines, so questioning somebody's literacy carries some weight as an extension of the classic City vs. Country rivalry. In the United States, or any country with a near-universal level of literacy, seriously accusing somebody of being illiterate is hilariously petty at best.
• Dance Party Ending: Sometimes, after the reveal, if the scammer had not hung up in anger, Kit would often inquire about if they could sing a song together — most often "Ocean Man." This has largely disappeared as Kit has, for various reasons, moved away from revealing.
  • One famous moment had the scammer singing "Hotline Bling" (though with the mondegreen "jail phone" — which would become a recurring meme in the chat)
• Dating Service Disaster: Scams that claim to offer support for dating websites exist; SilverSingles users seem to be the most common target. Generally the dating service is simply used as a hook, after which the script becomes a standard tech support or refund scam.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The emotional hook of most refund scams go by the logic that a company would instantly fire an employee that made a single mistake, even if the error wasn't even their fault.
  • Scammers have often shown to casually threaten victims with emptying their bank accounts or even getting them arrested just for being mildly annoying. Downplayed in that they very rarely have any power to actually follow through on any of this, but still. They can sometimes lock victims out of their computers, though, and have often tried doing this with Kit's characters out of annoyance.
• Driving a Desk: Kit sometimes uses green-screened backgrounds to simulate him either driving or jogging somewhere to supposedly get gift cards for a scammer. This can sometimes result in this effect, such as here where it looks like Kit is jogging in place and the background is moving behind him.
• Dull Surprise: Some of the most low-effort scammers fall into this, failing to inject any emotion into their speech even when they're supposed to be shocked at a too-large transfer or begging desperately for the victim to save their job.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • In the early days of the channel, Kitboga would always reveal himself at the end to the scammer and letting them know their time was wasted. He stopped doing that because he finds it more fun if the scammers think they've failed to scam an actual target even after the video is over. Additionally, the early videos lack some of the signatures of later material, such as the more complex Chroma Key backgrounds and the crazy characters, instead featuring Kitboga speaking to the scammers using his own voice. (These days his own voice is usually reserved for the "rival scammer" character Daniel.)
  • As the streams have continue to progress, certain elements have been dropped such as the "Memometer" and the speed-run overlay at the top related to the tech support scams. The "nudes" folder discussed elsewhere is never seen anymore, as Kit spends more time with refund scammers than tech support scammers that would be likely to try to open it. Also, it's a dead giveaway that it's a scambait.
• Edutainment Show: Kitboga's work consists basically of PSAs about scammers, their general mindsets, and how they tend to operate... in the form of using these things against them in prank calls that both keep them busy and often humiliate and enrage them in absurd ways.
• The Eeyore: Kit's bank manager character.
• Elder Abuse: On a few occasions, Kitboga has discovered that scammers who quickly hang up on other characters are often happy to talk to Edna, and that's when the scam isn't explicitly targeted at the elderly like the aforementioned SilverSingles support scam.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Played With. In one of the "Will Scammers Do My Work For Gift Cards?" calls, the scammer Jake, who actually did help Kitboga's character Kelly with her work and interviewed several other "employees" (also Kit's characters), accidentally manages to get Kelly fired by messing up the TPS Reports. While willing to scam her and take her gift cards, Jake takes it upon himself to call Kelly's boss (also Kit) to convince him to not fire her, and even admits to him of being a scammer even if that has an extremely high chance of ruining everything he worked for. And then he attempts to scam her even after that, and even uses the fact that he "helped save her job" to manipulate her.
  • In "What Scammers Do When You Have $0.00," while the scammer clearly has no problem with scamming what he thinks is an old woman, he's genuinely concerned when he thinks that "her" ex-husband is threatening to hurt her.
• Everything Except Most Things: In "I Got Married... To A Scammer!," Kitboga's character promises the scammer to watch any television channel he wants once they're married, so long as it's HGTV, Discovery Channel or FOX News.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: When a scammer recognizes him as "Kitbigo", he immediately asks him "why are you doing this?".
• Exact Time to Failure: It's not uncommon to find that scammers need to use pre-paid phone cards to call people. If so, around the 1-hour mark an audible voice will announce the impending end of the call.
  You have... sixty... one... seconds.
• Exact Words:
  • Due to English not being the first language of most scammers, it is common for them to exclaim that the victim doesn't "have to" do something, when they really mean that they "must not" do something. Kit frequently exploits that when it comes to things like gift card redemptions.
  • Kitboga sometimes likes to tell refund scammers that if they do certain things such as sing a song, then he will give them back all of the money that they sent him. Since the whole key to these scams is that they don't actually send any money, he is not lying.
• Excuse Me While I Multitask: Kit has an incredible ability to multitask on-stream while working at dismantling a scammer's schemes; he's often seen adding code to his bait pages and programs, or conversing with the viewers, all while the scammer is none the wiser!
• Facepalm: In the animated version of "Buying Gift Cards Instead of Hot Dogs (for Scammers)," the scammer does this several times in response to Kitboga doing stuff like claiming not to know about Walmart gift cards. As Kitboga starts talking about having typed up an order for hot dogs on the Walmart website, he double facepalms.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Kitboga's fake banks in particular are full of gags and memes (see If You Can Read This below) that would set off alarms if the scammers were actually paying the slightest bit of attention. Some may not be obvious to those from other countries like the scammers, but stuff like "Cash me outside, how about dat?" or "3.3333% interest rate (repeating, of course)" ought to raise red flags. Another good one is "Banking doesn't have to be complicated, but it is anyways." There's also the ones where he runs Windows RG ("Really Good") Edition, a parody of version of Windows so fake and with such obvious memes, it's crazy any of the scammers believe it for a second. In this video, his desktop has a background which reads "Windows 9 Professional." There is no such thing as "Windows 9."
  • The form in "When Scammers Pretend to Be Doctors" is so blatant that it should completely obvious to all but the thickest numbskull, yet somehow the scammer falls for it and blows over an and a half hour surveying Kitboga's characters. The form includes questions such as "Do you or anyone in your family have a history of the following? - Hypertension, Pancreatic arrhythmia, Myopic astigmatism, Counter Strike Syndrome, Amogus suspecocus, Follicle malderation" and "Do you agree with any of the following? - Hot dogs are technically sandwiches, 22 t, Yes between 5 to 40 hours a week, Yes for longer than 40 hours a week." The questions are also sometimes missing answer choices that should be there and furthermore will result in an error unless a selection is made, even though in some cases they are presented as "Do you agree?" choices and the person being surveyed might not agree with any of them. Additionally, Kitboga even makes changes to the form on the fly and the scammer doesn't even notice that the form has changed.
  • In "52 Hackers Were Found On My Network (By Scammers)," Granny Edna goes off on a rambling tangent about having received 52 e-mails. A bit later, the scammer asks her to give him her e-mail address and she replies that she's not sure she has one, asking if the scammer can help her create one. The scammer completely fails to notice the contradiction.
  • In "This $80,000 Scam Backfired After 15 Hours," when the scammers ask for Allison Vunderland's (Granny Edna's) Bank of Account username and password, Kit provides this as a photograph of a piece of paper with username given as "Nunya" and password as "Bizniz."^note "None of your business." Despite the obvious trolling and him all but spelling out for them, they still fail to pick up on it and continue to speak with his character for over 2 1/2 more hours.
• Fake Relationship: Numerous scammers have pretended to be Edna/Matilda's grandson or other relatives. It's just as sickening as it sounds to see them try to hoodwink what they think are shop staff, genuine technicians and even family members of Kit's personas.
• Forced to Watch:
  • Kitboga reserves this particular fate to scammers who want gift cards from their victims: Kitboga pulls up a (fake) Google Playstore on the computer, promptly remove all control of the PC from the scammer (though still allowing them to see the screen) and then redeem fake Google Play gift cards right in front of them. This makes said scammers go completely bonkers, and will often scream at Kitboga's character to stop as they see what they think is actual money, and their scam with it, going up in smoke. In the most successful / longest scambaits, he has actually done this trick more than once, as he claims that he thinks by doing this he is actually sending them the money. (And therefore they tell him to go back out and get more gift cards.) In other cases, he has pretended to buy stuff with the amount of extra refund money he supposedly received. In 2022, with scammers increasingly asking for Target gift cards instead of Google Play, Kitboga took the time to make a fake Target redeem, with great success.
  • A variant on this involves a fake pop-up box created by Kitboga himself that mimics ransomware. It claims that Kitboga's computer is now locked and all files on it will be deleted unless a certain amount of money is submitted via gift card codes within a specified time period. The scammer then watches helplessly as Kitboga submits the codes into this box, apparently to be received by another, apparently much more successful, scammer on the other end.
• Foregone Conclusion: It's known from the start that the scammers are always going to have their scheme foiled, what makes it entartaining is how it's going to be foiled, along with their reactions.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Scams related to technical support, "refund" scams and IRS/tax scams tend to be Kit's bread-and-butter. There are a few, however, which are rather different, such as the ones in which he clicks on phishing links sent by followers to show viewers what they're all about. Some are in a PSA format, explaining / exploring how a particular scam works and maybe including a portion of a call after the PSA. Finally, he's even explored a couple of the "love" scams, such as people preying on postings from dating sites, or even a bizarre one involving love potions.
• Funny Background Event: In later installments, some of his green-screened backgrounds contain references to stuff from previous videos, such as a plaque reading "Proud member of the Illuminati" (scam in which the scammer tried to get him to pay to join the Illuminati) and a cup of milk and a sponge sitting next to each other on a table (reference to a gag with "Windows RG" parody in which Clippy replaced anything within the Word document with the phrase "milk sponge.")
• Gaslighting:
  • Since a huge part of scams is making certain that the victim doesn't speak to anyone who would recognize the situation for the sham that it is and warn them about it, scammers will often go to great lengths to convince victims that literally everyone around them is out to trick them or screw them out of their money, except, of course, for the scammer themselves. While sometimes this involves actually chasing off other scammers, they will also push victims to avoid or ignore legitimate employees of shops or banks, and on a few occasions even their own families.
  • Many of the most successful scambaits ultimately involve Kitboga himself doing this to the scammer(s). He spins a whole scenario for them, complete with crazy characters and the most oddball situations, such that by the time they're done, many of the scammers no longer know which way is up. They're no longer certain if they're even running a scam, if somebody is trying to scam Kitboga, or in some cases end up completely off the mark from whatever scam it was they were originally trying to run in the first place. Either way, they find themselves completely in Kitboga's alternate reality and Kitboga is only all to happy to eventually end the call with them believing that they just wasted hours of their time with nothing to show for it.
• Gilligan Cut: Used to great effect in one video.
  Scammer: On the Steam cards, there will be a scratch bar. You need to scratch that part, but do not scratch it hard otherwise the numbers will be erased.
  [Cut to Edna vigorously "scratching" the cards]
  Scammer: No no no! Don't scatch it hard, listen!
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Typically, after Kit reveals himself, the scammers will curse and hang up. But occasionally they'll stick around and chat; and on rare occasions, they'll be polite and jovial. Once in a blue moon, they'll even accompany Kit on a call with another scammer.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Bizarrely, many scammers seem to pepper in the word "si" for confirmation, instead of using "yes".^note Bizarre because the scammers are almost always based in India, with Hindi as their first language, in which "yes" is "haan." Perhaps they figure that since they can't hide their obvious foreign accent anyway, they might as well just pretend to be Spanish to sound more like people from the west?
• Hand Rubbing: In the animated version of "Buying Hot Dogs Instead of Gift Cards (For Scammers)," the scammer rubs his hands together in wicked anticipation upon first taking Kitboga's call. He later does it again when Kitboga claims to have purchased $1,000 worth of gift cards.
• Heel–Face Turn: In "Scammers Are Afraid I'm Psychic," he successfully convinces a scammer that his character is psychic through cold reading and convinces him to rethink his life.
• Heel–Faith Turn: In "This Scammer Faced Karma (and lost)", Kit engages in a theological discussion with the scammer on the subject of Karma. While this has happened with other scammers on occasion, this time the conversation lasted over an hour, and at the end the scammer was clearly uncomfortable with continuing the scam and sheepishly backed out.
  • This scammer, who attempted to masquerade as a priest, seemingly underwent a Hollywood Exorcism when Edna began singing the chorus of the Christian song Herbert The Snail! After the scammer sung a few lines out of tune and too slowly, the following exchange happened:
  Edna: "Remember, remember, that God is patient too!"
  Scammer: "Have... patience... Reee-member, remember, remember- OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD! OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!"
  Edna: "And think of all the times others had to wait for you!"
  Scammer: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NO DON'T SING IN FRONT OF ME DON'T SING THIS SONG IN FRONT OF ME!"
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": "Do you know what a floppy disk is?" Kit is visibly amused by how the caller ends up pronouncing "disk".
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • One of the standard tactics of refund scammers is to claim that they will lose their job unless the target gives them back the excess money that they refunded, typically via gift cards. So, in this video, Kitboga claims that he is Kelly from a company's Human Resources department. Then, when the scammer asks "Kelly" to go get gift cards, she tells him that if he wants her to do this, then he needs to do her job, which involves calling up various employees and getting their responses to a sudrvey regarding their job satisfaction. Although he does some of this, when he fails to fill out and submit the form properly over multiple calls, she tells him that she has lost her job. At this point, he calls a number which he thinks goes to Kelly's boss, but which is actually Kitboga himself using his own voice, admitting that he's a scammer and telling the boss that he was the one doing the surveys and that he was taking advantage of Kelly and not to fire her. He then calls "Kelly" back and tells her that he's saved her job, only to say that he was lying to the boss about being a scammer and he still needs gift cards from her. Kitboga, unamused, eventually tells him as Kelly that not only has she lost her job, but now she's in legal trouble for giving a criminal company information and access to a company computer system.
  • He later admitted that this was his new favorite way to mess with scammers and continued doing it with other scammers.
  • The standard "refund" scam involves editing the HTML to make it look as though the scammers transferred too much money to the victim, when actually all they did was an internal transfer between the checking and savings accounts. Thus, when Kit does stuff like "redeeming" gift cards in front of them, it is essentially a taste of their own medicine since he isn't actually doing anything but running a program that fakes a confirmation screen claiming that $500 has been redeemed whenever you enter any 16-digit string. The "bank account" that they manipulate is also entirely fake.
• Holding Both Sides of the Conversation:
  • Sometimes, Kit has played multiple characters at once — typically as either family members or store clerks (in the latter, typically asking them where the Google Play gift cards are) — to make his side of the calls seem more plausible and realistic. In one call, Kit posed as another tech support caller from the "World Wide Web Wide Tech Support Team" trying to offer his services to Edna. He also at times pretended to be a representative from his fake bank, or a rival scammer.
  • Perhaps the ultimate example of this is the call "Furious Scammer Faces His Worst Nightmare," a.k.a. "José from Microsoft." The fun begins around an hour and a half into the call, when Kitboga pretends to connect the scammer with "Tony," a rival scammer that his Ethel character (Granny Edna) claims is helping her with her printer. Things quickly go wild from there, as when the scammer starts to question Tony's claims, Tony starts putting various other people on the line, including "FTC Frank" and "Better Business Bureau Bob." All are just thinly disguised versions of the "Tony" voice and the scammer is convinced this guy is using multiple voices to try to scam Ethel, not realizing that they're all the same person, whose real voice he's never heard. Things then go up a level, when the Tony character then claims to connect the call to Joe Biden, then Joe Biden's non-existent son "Tony Biden," and later Jennifer Lopez. Kitboga even manipulates the scammer into the act, first engineering him into a situation in which he pretends to be his own father, and later to pretend to be Arnold Schwarzenegger.
• Hollywood Hacking: Many tech support scams use the threat of hackers to convince the victim that new security is needed, and their descriptions are often in this vein.
• Hopeless with Tech: While naturally Kit's characters aren't computer literate to make them easier targets, from time to time, the scammers themselves are prone to this, especially during the refund scams. In fact, Kitboga has done entire videos just to prove the point that the tech scammers know hardly anything about fixing computers or using Windows and are operating entirely from a script.
• Hurricane of Excuses In "They Sent $3K "By Mistake" - I Played Along For Hours", Kit makes the scammer talk to the Best Buy manager ('played' by Neveah) in order to justify why he needs to buy $3,000 worth of gift cards. Along with almost losing his job, he claims to have both a broken leg and a disease that keeps him confined to the home, along with being an only child, in debt to his employer, a 'drug addict', struggling to pay his bills, and the only way his father (Kit) can give him money for rehab is via gift cards.
  Kit: Does this guy think that he's helping right now?
• Hypocritical Humor: Kitboga's characters will often chastise the scammers for wasting their time or taking forever, even as Kitboga purposely does stuff to waste the scammers's time and delay them and/or the character follows this up by launching a long, rambling story.
• I Can't Hear You: This is a standard gambit of his, either to waste a bit of scammer time, or to play dumb when he pretends to redeem gift cards, etc. and the scammers shout for him not to do it. He also loves to do this to deliberately misinterpret what they're saying when they swear in Hindi.
• If You Can Read This: His fake banks are full of this sort of thing, such as "Banking doesn't have to be complicated, but it is anyways." The terms and conditions on one of them is the United States Declaration of Independence. In another video he supposedly sets up a new account with the fake bank, claiming to the scammer that it's the first time he's using it on the computer instead of his phone. Potential security questions, of which three must be chosen, include "What's love got to do with it?", "What's updog?", "What did the fox say?", "Who let the dogs out?", "What is your Social Security number?", "Where is Waldo?" and "What would you do for a Klondike bar?"
• I Have a Family: This is a fairly common (and disgusting) scammer tactic and one of the ways in which they try to draw sympathy from the intended victim. This often goes along with the whole "I'm going to lose my job if you don't give me back this money" tactic that is part of many of the refund scams. In this video, around the 1:44 mark, the scammer starts with this (even before first part of the scam has been completed) and Kitboga picks it apart for all its worth. When the scammer claims he can't feed his family, Kitboga starts offering to connect him with local charities, only for the scammer to refuse. He then asks the scammer if the children go to school. The scammer claims that he can't afford it and Kitboga points out that it's both free, as well as illegal for them not to be in school if they're school age.
• I Have Your Wife:
  • In "The Craziest Scammer Ever I've Ever Called," one of the stratagems of the scammer is to claim that he is being held hostage and needs money from Kitboga's character, who has supposedly fallen in love with him and is his wife, if he is to be released.
  Kitboga: Release him right now! I do not negotiate with kidnappers! Release him!
  • Happens twice in "They Ransomed My Grandson for $10,000" in a rather nonsensical way. In the middle of a long call where Kitboga convinced the scammer that he's trying to free his son from prison, the scammer suddenly switches gears to claim that he's keeping his son in prison as ransom. He then later claims that he's keeping Kitboga's wife hostage; when Kit lies saying that she's in the house, the kidnapper claims that that is not actually his wife.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: In "Using AI Deep Fakes to Get Revenge on Scammers," the scammer asks Kitboga's character if he's ever shared his wi-fi password with anyone. He assures the scammer that he hasn't, that he went to a computer class and in it, he was told to never the share the wi-fi password with anyone.
  Kitboga: Do you need my wi-fi password? I could tell it to you if you need it. ... The password for the wifi, it's just "w-i-f-i" seven times.
• Implausible Deniability:
  • In "When Scammers Lose $100,000," Kitboga convinces the scammers that his character, Ethel Goodglove (Granny Edna) is also working with a woman named Dr. Linda and her assistant, Igor, to resurrect her deceased husband Richard via a magic potion. About halfway through the call, Kit manipulates one of the scammers into pretending to be Igor, except that the scammer continues speaking using his own voice, even though Kit previous depicted Igor as having a heavy Russian accent. Kit plays along, but then asks "Igor" to turn the phone over to Dr. Linda. When the scammer then claims to be Dr. Linda, still using his regular voice, Kit can no longer deal and calls out the scammer in character for obviously not being Dr. Linda.
  • In "Giving Scammers Empty Gift Cards," about a half hour in, the scammer wants the last six digits of Granny Edna's debit card. Granny Edna suggests that they call Bank of America, so the scammer starts pretending to be "Tina from Bank of America," using a terrible fake female voice. Kitboga goes into a paroxysm of silent giggles and just rolls with it, even though the scammer obviously isn't trying and, of course, "Tina from Bank of America" has the exact same behavior and speech patterns as the scammer.
• Ineffectual Death Threat:
  • The scammer in "Crazy IRS Scammer Threatens To Kill Old Lady Over $200" threatens to drive a bullet through Edna's head for not paying $200 over a non-existent lawsuit.
  • The "angriest scammer ever" threatens to shoot Edna's husband.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Some of the scammers can end up falling into this, especially if they are on the incompetent side.
  • It has been noted that Friday streams tend to feature some of the most ineffective and low-effort scammers of the bunch. Kit's theory is that Friday (which is Saturday in Asia) is when scammers who have failed to hit their weekly quota work overtime, resulting in a noticeable drop in the quality of the scams.
  • The 36-hour record call with "Adam and the Boys" takes this up to eleven. Around the 8-hour mark, Kit starts portraying Edna as someone with $3 million in savings who routinely falls for simple scams, but also as somebody who "Adam" is completely incapable of getting money from.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: During the 36+ hour bait with Adam and Alex, they at one point pretend to be a Google support line. Alex at one point rants about Matilda (Edna) having purchased Apple cards, something which Kit did mention at one point, but which "Google" shouldn't know anything about. When Kit asks how they know about this, Alex's reply is that "Google know everything." "You got me there," agrees Matilda.
• Inherently Funny Words: When scammers demand that Edna goes to a supermarket, she'll often pick the rather distinctly named American chain Piggly Wiggly.
• In Medias Res: For the highlight videos on YouTube, Kitboga often likes to open with a highlight of a particularly important or entertaining video on the call, then back up to the beginning.
• Insane Troll Logic: Much of what happens in scams operates on things that don't really make a lick of sense and that the scammers can only get the victims to go along with because they create a sense of urgency. However, possibly the ultimate example of this has to be Sam Johnson and the "Tubs" saga. The scammers tell Kitboga's Granny Edna character that hackers have authorized a $3,000 charge at PornHub on her account. The bank can't remove this because someone on her phone line pressed "2" to authorize it. The only way they can remove the charge is if she goes out purchases Lowe's gift cards to create a "duplicate charge," at which point the bank will flag the charge as being unusual for being a "duplicate" and therefore cancel both charges. This is so ridiculous that Kitboga manages to string them along for nearly an hour claiming not to understand and trying to make them explain. He then misinterpets in the way only he can, by claiming to go to Lowe's, only to instead purchase $3,000 worth of products, including a "drainless bathtub," in order to make a duplicate charge.
• Insistent Terminology: In "Scammer Loses His Mind Over $3,00,000," the scammer asks why Kitboga hung up. He tells the scammer that he didn't hang up, that he disconnected the call. "It's different than hanging up."
• Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: Some Genre Savvy scammers have questioned whether the call is being recorded to go on YouTube. As a rule, Kitboga tends to avoid uploading those calls to his channel since he sees it as an attempt to 'tank' the call by raising the possibility that the scammer is in on the joke. So far, a tiny handful of scammers have mentioned Kitboga by name; none of them has mentioned his stream, only his YouTube channel.
• Internet Jerk: A fair few scammers count, especially if they're doing a scam related to legal affairs.
• Intimidating Revenue Service: The IRS/tax scammers represent a dark exploitation of this trope.
• Irony: For a "business" that is entirely based on taking advantage of people who are Hopeless with Tech, many scammers seem to have remarkably little patience for anyone who doesn't immediately understand their overly complicated and often poorly-given instructions, quickly getting beligerent after only a couple of delays in their script. Thus, Kit provides an Ironic Hell for them: a person who should provide them with a guaranteed successful scam, but will make the call last as long as possible before ultimately failing to actually deliver the scammer's goal, or being Too Dumb to Fool.
• Is That a Threat?:
  • A little more than three hours into "When Scammers Think You're a Bitcoin Millionaire", Kitboga's character is refusing to cooperate with the refund scam, given that she's a Bitcoin millionaire and therefore doesn't really care about wasting time trying to claim a $300 refund. The scammers tell her that she has to take the money, saying that if she doesn't take the money "then there will be a problem with your banking." "Are you threatening me right now?!" wonders Kitboga, asking just what sort of problem there's going to be.
  • In "Scammer Smashes Phone After Losing $3,000," the scammer insists that Kitboga tell him his zip code fast so that he can look up where the nearest Target store is to get gift cards. Kitboga, however, is growing bored with the scammer due to his ineffectualness and it doesn't help that the scammer's next move is to state that if Kit doesn't hurry up with the zip code he will go into his bank account and "took out all the money," a standard scammer threat when they're otherwise out of options. "You wanna see that?" asks the scamer and Kit asks if he's threatening him right now.
• It's Been Done: One of Kitboga's regular scammer time-wasters is to describe in detail an idea for a business he thinks is a brilliant new concept, except that it's something that already exists, like an ambulance. Subverted in that the scammers rarely point this out, because they don't care and simply want him to stop talking.
• I've Never Seen Anything Like This Before: This is Kitboga's basic reaction to the events of this video. Throughout his many scambaits, he's both put scammers through a number of ridiculous scenarios and seen some pretty weird stuff in return. Nevertheless, he can barely believe it in this video when a pair of scammers waste over three hours with him and he manages to get their bank account info to shut down, all while he's running a parody version of Windows called "Windows RG" ("Really Good" edition.) As he points out himself, Windows RG is not simply fake, but insanely fake, so much so that it insults the user and when you try to shut it down using the menu warns that "there is a high chance of your processor overheating", making absolutely obvious its nature as a joke. He normally only uses it when he isn't trying to actively scambait and just wants to have a bit of fun. Yet the scammer never seems to catch on to what's going on, even though, as Kitboga himself shows several times, the supposed web browser that's a part of it doesn't work, leading to the logic bomb that if it doesn't work, how could he have navigated to the Internet in the first place to get the scammer connected with his PC?
• Jaw Drop: In the animated version of "Buying Gift Cards Instead of Hot Dogs (for Scammers)," Billy Maizear's son Morty's jaw drops when he takes off his shirt, revealing himself to have "the body of a Greek god."
• Kangaroo Court: One of Adam and Alex's more outrageous scams is to convince the mark that they are on trial, a "trial" takes place over the phone, starts the moment the lawyer is assigned to the case, and the prosecution doubles as the judge.
• Kansas City Shuffle:
  • One time-wasting exercise is to try and connect a scammer to a different call centre to watch them argue. Sometimes it devolves into this, with one of the scammers acting like they are protecting Kit from the other scammer, before proceeding with their own after they've been chased off.
  • More broadly, this is generally how several government impersonation scams work. By claiming that the victim's identity is being exploited to perform criminal activities, they try to convince the victim that they need to pay to prevent further issues.
• Knew It All Along: After a reveal, scammers tend to claim that they knew Kit was a scambaiter the entire time. Kit notes that the scammers are trying to save face; he even picks this apart by saying that if the scammers truly knew about the scambait, they would have hung up on Kit to move on to a real person. He has cited this as part of the reason why in later installments he has largely stopped revealing because the response tend to predictably be this and he prefers to end things with them thinking that they wasted hours of time on a potential actual victim and got nothing for it.
• Lack of Empathy: Scammers in general, of course, with some being particularly more monstrous than others, threatening such actions as physical assault, extortion and even rape and murder of both the victim and their loved ones. One of the most extreme showings of this is that, pretty much any time a victim starts crying - and since most of these scams play on the victim's emotions, this isn't at all uncommon - their immediate reaction is to demand, often quite viciously, that they shut up, often threatening them if they don't do so immediately.
  Kitboga: You really have to have no heart at all to do something like this. You really have to not care about anyone but yourself.
• Leet Lingo: Kit often ends the number of his checking accounts on his fake bank in 1337, generally the only number shown, since the website of a typical bank will only show the last four digits. He will also sometimes use this as the last four digits of other numbers requested by the scammers, such as a Social Security Number.
• Likes Older Women: A lot of scammers have tried this tactic to get Edna to follow their scam; they can get extremely creepy at times, and Kit isn't afraid to call them out or shoot them down in-character when they try this.
• Logic Bomb: Kit backs a scammer into a corner in Foolish Scammer Rage Quits After -500 IQ Play by applying basic logic to the premise of the scam. The scammer offers "Lindsay" two options, either cancel the "subscription", or manually renew it, however the scammer also hangs the threat of being auto-charged an exorbitant fee, to push the victim into paying the "cancelation fee". Kit tells them to cancel, and to pay the fee with the card used to for the auto-charge, the scammer claims that it's impossible since only "the server" has that info. Then Kit tells them to just let the server charge then, but then the scammer claims that it has to be manually renewed, since auto-charge has been canceled. Problem solved then!
• Manchild: A fair few scammers are certainly this, being completely immature, petty, petulant, and utterly lacking in patience. Kit's characters often default to using this as an insult against them, both because of how accurate it is and because many of them tend to really hate it. He will even occasionally turn this into Oblivious Mockery by suggesting early on that they sound like they're in their teens or younger.
• Mathematician's Answer: When the scammers ask a question such as "Are you using a desktop or a laptop?", Kit likes to tick them off by replying with "yes."
• Metaphorgotten: One of Kit's favorite scammer time-wasters is to tell a long, rambling story that is supposed to be a metaphor of some sort or have a lesson, which is thoroughly forgotten as the story branches off in five different directions. On rare occasions, the scammer may supply one, which may or may not resemble whatever was originally being driven towards.
• Mistaken Age:
  • It is common when Kit portrays older characters for the scammers to express that they sound much younger than they actually are. This has happened so frequently that Kit speculates that it is written into their scripts as an attempt for the scammers to endear themselves to the victim.
    Kitboga: I swear this is in their script. I swear it's always the same thing: 'Ask how old they are. If they're old, say "O-M-G, you sound so young"'.
  • Inverted in "Scammers Hate When You Redeem Gift Cards." Kitboga is playing Neveah, an air-headed valley girl character who is supposed to be 25 years old. Yet the scammer, who has already ticked off Neveah, tries to apologize and say that she is like his grandmother. This causes Neveah to become even more enraged, asking him where he gets off.
• Mistaken Identity: Jim Browning is such a notorious scambaiter, that Kit has occasionally been mistaken for him by scammers that catch on.
• Mood-Swinger: Scammers routinely go from berating and threatening people, to sucking up to them, to begging pathetically at the drop of a hat.
• Motormouth: Plenty of examples, especially considering the whole premise of the channel is of scammers who tend to default to trying to talk over the people they call, and Kit's characters, who tend to drone on constantly deliberately to annoy them, but there are some standouts:
  • Kit's character Daniel, which makes sense given that he's supposed to be a scammer himself, especially when rattling off the company he supposedly works for.
  • This particular scammer, when completely failing to achieve the first part of the actual scam ^note That is, causing the victim to "accidentally" enter too much money into a form by putting in extra zeroes before immediately hitting enter. In this case, Kit successfully entered the correct amount multiple times; the one time the scammer entered anything himself, Kit hadn't actually typed anything yet, resulting in a '$000' being entered. resorts to spouting out his spiel at ridiculous speed and refusing to stop for even a moment to let Kit get a word in. However, Kit ultimately responded in kind.
• Never My Fault: While a few refund scammers will lean more on the manipulation of guilting victims into trying to save their job and thus will be willing to admit that the fault of the excessive transfer was theirs, a lot of them are strangely insistent that the mistake was because of the victim, even when it's completely obvious that the victim entered everything correctly despite the scammer's attempts at interference, or even when the victim wasn't even involved in entering any information in the first place.
• No Honor Among Thieves: Certainly none among scammers; it seems that one thing they hate more than just about anything else is competition. Any time two rival scammers end up on the same call with a potential victim, they will very enthusiastically point the other out as a scammer, at times going into detail about their own scam just to keep the other scammer from succeeding at it either. Occasionally, one will seem to take "the high road" by seeming to give up and stop scamming completely while disparaging the other scammer. However, Kitboga notes that about 80% of the time when they do this, if they manage to "get rid" of the other scammer, they will then go back to trying to scam afterwards.
• No Longer with Us: Kit has pulled this a couple of times with his elderly personas, who will claim that their spouse is "no longer with us", only to clarify that they're away on vacation or left the house to do errands.
• Non-Answer: In "Scammers Expected $5,000 But Grandma Buys a Scooter," the scammer tells Kitboga's Granny Edna character that she is "with the Amazon server." Granny Edna tells him that he she has a question: "What is a server?" He tells her that this is the secure server by which she is getting the application form that is not available to anyone apart from her. "But what is a server?" she asks him. "The server is an Amazon server, ma'am. Amazon server," he tells her. She asks if he's talking about the people who give you food at restaurants. She says that she doesn't know what he means by "server," that he just keeps saying "server." She tells him that she's asking him for the fifth time, for $500, "What is a server?"^note There are multiple factors at play here. The first is that the scammers themselves are often largely computer illiterate - as Kit has demonstrated in other videos, they often only know what is in their scripts. The second is that even if the scammer does know how to explain it, he wouldn't want to because it would give away too much about the scam. Finally, he doesn't want to spend time explaining stuff when he could be scamming.
  Scammer: The server is Amazon secure server.
  Granny Edna: Okay.
• Non Sequitur: Kit just loves to pepper conversations with scammers with non-sequiturs, both to waste their time and see how they react - if they will try to engage on the subject, or just ignore and try to move on with their script.
• No Sense of Direction: Kit will occasionally ask scammers to give him directions via Google Maps when going to the store. Special mention must go to Episode #714, which featured a scammer who was absurdly incompetent with a map. He frequently gave unhelpful and often incorrect directions that sent Kit in the opposite direction, while taking forever to update Kit on where to go next, even despite Kit stopping at multiple points to let the scammer catch his bearings. It ultimately took two hours for Kit to virtually drive a distance that should've took around 25 minutes. The next day, even though the map clearly showed that Kit's character was in Chicago, the scammer seemed to be under the impression that he was living in Mexico.
• No Sympathy:
  • Scammers will often start out acting sympathetic and helpful, but can often flip to no sympathy on a hat, especially if their scam is starting to fall apart. They will often try to drain every last dollar from the victim and don't care about things such as medical bills, the victim's personal safety, etc., and will do anything just to try to suck in as much money as possible.
  • Depending on the scam and how Kit is personally feeling about the scammer, he may choose to go the no sympathy route with his characters. One of the most common claims of the "refund" scammers is that they "accidentally" transferred too much money and that they will lose their job if the victim doesn't send the money back as gift cards or a wire transfer or some such.
    Edna: Good! You should lose your job after making a mistake like that! You've been working for Microsoft for ten years. You can get another job.
• Not Even Bothering with an Excuse: On a few occasions where the scammer's facade falls apart early on, they simply devolve into a Broken Record of demanding gift cards without even the flimsiest of justifications as to why Kit should actually do so.
• Not Quite Forever: In "The Craziest Scammer I've Ever Called," the scammer asks Kitboga's character, Granny Edna, if she wants to live with him forever. Edna replies that she wants to live the rest of her years with him, not forever, that honestly at some point forever is a really long time.
• Number Obsession: In the scambait "52 Hackers Were Found On My Network (by scammers)," after Granny Edna is told as much, she becomes fixated on the number 52, finding it everywhere, such as a water bill for $52.52 and her Internet plan having been upgraded to 52 mbs. She is soon spinning a conspiracy theory worthy of QAnon and eventually tells the scammer that she thinks she needs to end the call, that she's been on the phone with him for 52 minutes and 52 seconds.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Kit is clearly a very smart and tech-savvy guy, and all his personas are Too Dumb to Fool.
• Online Alias: Being on the receiving end of death threats and other serious reactions from scammers after he confesses that his calls are a ploy, Kitboga is known only by his online handle, and thus details of his real name remain a secret.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
  • How Kit got caught in one call: coming back on, he accidentally set himself to the Dixie voice despite not having used that character for the call. He tried to explain it away by having her say that her husband was going to the bathroom, but the scammer recognized the voice as "Kit biggo" from his YouTube videos.
  • Narrowly averted only five minutes into "Scamming Scammers By Being A Scammer?", where Kit accidentally presses the button for the Edna voice for a moment. He explains it away by saying he accidentally put it on the speakerphone.
• Operator from India: The majority of illegitimate call centers are unfortunately these.
• Overly Long Gag
  • "Type in the letter T as in Tom. V as in vehicle. T as in tea. R as in Romeo. O as in oval. P as in Peter. E as in Edward. S as in Sam. A period. Then O as in Owen. R as in Romeo. G as in Geoffrey."
  • The "refund" scam (see under Recycled Script) often becomes an overly long gag when the scammer inevitably fumbles around trying to do the fake "deposit", especially with the state of Kit's virtual machine, his characters' antics, and a fake online bank. It's no surprise that the all-time records for longest calls (stretched over multiple "episodes" with the same scammer and Edna) have involved refunds.
  • Kit's go to fake rival scammers are from the World Wide Web Wide Tech Support Association of Certified Technological Professionals, or WWWWTSACTP for short(?). They even have their own hold music!
    • Speaking of the WWWWTSACTP, this is also the case for Kit's call with "Jay Anderson" as they kept getting transferred to different departments constantly.
• Overt Operative: One of the scam scripts as of around 2022 and later is to for the scammers to claim that somebody in the target's bank or something of the sort is compromised and so they need the target to become a "spy" and go undercover for them. Unfortunately for them, Kitboga's M.O. upon hearing this particular script is to be this, reveling in the supposed assignment and shouting about being a secret agent and such when he's pretending to be at the bank.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Any attempt to impersonate a specific company/institution falls apart pretty quickly when it becomes apparent that the scammer knows very little about it in question. From IRS workers lacking even basic knowledge regarding the US taxation system, to Microsoft technicians being stumped when asked about any computer issue not listed on their script. The scammer's claims that they work within the United States also often quickly fall flat once they are asked about geography.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Kit's characters get some moments of this, though between the scammers' shaky English and tendency to not pay attention to what he's saying, it often goes missed. Scammers also occasionally do this, though more often their contempt is a lot more overt.
  Scammer: I'm begging you, from the bottom of my heart.
  Kitboga(as Edna): Must be cold down there.
• Pass the Popcorn: In "Multiple Scammers Battle Over $40,000" at one point two scammers argue back and forth for ages, telling Kit that he should hang up the other's call and that the other is a scammer. Kit comments that he should probably just be a playing a game right now, that they're wasting their own time.
• Phoney Call: Used in one of the CRA scam calls, where the scammer is supposedly talking with the local RCMP branch at one point. But then Kit gets an actual call claiming to be from the phone number of said branch...
• Phony Psychic: At least twice now, Kitboga has pretended to be psychic during a scambaiting call, using a combination of his own accumulated knowledge of how the scams work ("I sense your job will soon be in jeopardy!") and traditional tactics such as Cold Reading. The first time, it goes so well that the scammers basically just give up on trying to scam his character and start confessing their troubles. The second time, it's not clear if the scammer ever really buys it, but it doesn't end up hurting the bait either (it ends up lasting over 4 and 1/2 hours).
• Phrase Catcher: Scammers always seem to end up saying the same handful of phrases to Kit during his antics, often becoming a Broken Record. "Do not redeem!", "Are you mad?!", "Listen to me!" and "Just do one thing" come up frequently.
• Plausible Deniability:
  • When pressed, scammers will often claim to be “Certified” or a “Third Party” as a slippery way of acknowledging that they aren’t actually the company they make a facade of being.
  • Kitboga also acknowledges that some call centers can exploit this too, such as by claiming that they really are a legitimate outsourced operation during recruitment. While some scams make it extremely clear that the perpetrator knows what they’re doing, it’s also plausible that some tech support scammers are simply following their script and not asking questions.
• Ponzi:
  • Although the primary focus of his channel revolves around tech support scams, Kitboga also has several videos which cover multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes.
  • This starts as a standard refund scam, which fizzles when the scammer can't figure out what to do when he sees $0 in the bank account. Rather than keep trying, the scammer instead on the fly switches to trying to get Kitboga into some kind of Ponzi or pyramid scheme. Kitboga happily pretends to play along with it, but the scammer ends up ending the call, saying he'll call back, but never does.
  • In this, Kitboga convinces a scammer to pitch a sham multi-level marketing company called "Golden Carrot," saying that if the scammer wants him to save their job by getting gift cards, then they have to save his job.
• Potty Emergency: Sometimes used as a stall when the character at a store, complete with Kit pouring water near the mic.
• Punch-Clock Villain: A couple of scammers show genuine regret for their work, and at times even admit to Kitboga's character, unprompted, that it's a scam and that they should hang up the call. Most notably in Reformed IRS Scammer Intercepts Our Call.
• Punny Name: Several of the characters Kitboga plays have sneakily punny names, such as "Allison Vunderlund" and "Billy Maizear" (a double pun: it means both "Billy Maize Ear" and "Billy Mays Here". Of course, rarely do the scammers notice anything. Another one of these is "Dawn Dewitt" or "Don Dewitt." So when the scammer shouts "Don't do it!" as Kit goes to redeem the gift cards, he replies "Dawn/Don, do it? Okay!" Yet another one he sometimes uses for the character most commonly known as Granny Edna is "Candice B. Real." ("Can this be real?") His characters also sometimes mention having two children named "Sam and Ella" (salmonella). Back when he still used fake banks before spoofing the real Bank of America's site, one of the supposed support representatives for them was named "Robin Bhankes."
• Rage Breaking Point: For many of the scammers, it's right about when Kitboga is doing stuff like pretending to redeem Google Play gift card codes before their very eyes. Surprisingly, this is actually to their benefit, as those who don't break at this point are the ones that Kitboga is able to string along even further, wasting legendary amounts of time.
• Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud:
  • "Please have a convincing tone".
  • "We are not XYZ".
  • "I Found The World's Dumbest Scammer" has Kit send the scammer scrambling to find his persona's name. Using a screenshot the scammer took of his bank's welcome page, he declares that Kit's name is "Hello, Louise".
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Kit will often deliver one of these at the end of a video, usually while the scammer berates him with profanity and threatens to murder him, among other things. Even after he stopped regularly revealing himself to scammers, he will occasionally manage to deliver these in-character, usually after the scammer has been baited enough that they'll continue trying to come back anyway.
  • He gave a particularly harsh one to the scammer "Steve" in The Angriest Scammer I've Ever Called
  Scammer Steve:“I will kill him [your husband] in front of you!”
  Kitboga, as Edna: No, you can’t. You are an evil, evil man, you know that. Steve, I think somewhere along the way over the past 10 hours here you kind of lost it. You lost your self control, you’ve gone a little bit in- Maybe a little a little crazy there honey. Calm down, alright. You and I both know that you just need some money. You’re not gonna hurt anybody, you don’t want to go to jail. You don’t want to do any of these things, alright… Listen, you should stay on the shallow way. Listen, you’re just a kid, you’re just a baby. You’re going to the deep end right now, you dove head first into the deep side. You need to put your little swimmy’s on and just stay in the one foot deep pool. Steve,
  [Steve interrupts to repeatedly screams at her to buy a target gift card]
  Kitboga, as Edna: Steve, you’re a little boy. For someone who seems to think so highly of themselves, and who has claimed to have so much power over this situation, you’re acting like a little child. You’re acting like a fool. So here’s what I’m wondering. Steve, what are you hoping to get out of this, because 10 hours ago when I talked to you on the phone, you stole 260 thousand dollars from me; But now I’m looking at my bank and I’m realizing I still have 260,000 dollars in here, and you are screaming like a helpless little child when mommy doesn’t give you what you want, and it makes me think to myself ‘You know what? Steve, Steve has no control over this situation. I mean, if he could take 260,000 dollars from my bank account right now, why wouldn’t he just do that?
• Record Needle Scratch: This is used in "Scammer Expected $5,000 But Grandma Buys A Scooter" when Granny Edna is the middle of thanking "Amazon" for having given her $5,000 that she used to buy a scooter complete with a schmaltzy piano tune playing in the background and the scammer tells her she has to send the money back.
• Recycled Script (In-Universe): A particular type of scam tends to have a common series of events — and sometimes, identical scripts with little to no variation — between the various call centers that perform them.
  • The tech support scams tend to have various recurring elements that stick out, including:
    • Being roped in by being called directly, or being told via Schmuck Bait to phone a specific number — by either a voice mail, or a pop-up on a questionable website (often resembling an error message such as a Blue Screen of Death or Microsoft website).
    • Directing the user to go to a website for an online screen sharing program (most commonly GoToAssist, but others have also been used, such as TeamViewer or Supremo). Not by going into their web browser, but by telling users to literally open the Run dialog by pressing the Windows key and R together, and instructing the user to type out the URL letter-by-letter (often using phrases such as "R as in Romeo", which turns this into an Overly Long Gag).
    • Going into Windows administrative tools such as the Event Viewer or Services to explain that events and warnings (or in the latter case, stopped services) are a sign of issues, misrepresenting the tree command in the Command Prompt as being a virus scan (it literally just prints out the directory structures), claiming stopped Windows services actually are services that stopped because your license expired (Services on Windows are background tasks, not unlike daemons on Linux, and not all of them are necessarily always running), etc.
    • Trying to sell the user a subscription for "software" to fix the problem.
    • Occasionally, the scammer will try and show the caller a legitimate website selling SSL certificates or hardware firewalls (and by that we mean, a product irrelevant for PC security, and enterprise-grade networking equipment that is overkill for a typical home user) and state that this is what they need to buy to fix their problems.
  • The "refund" scam is even more ridiculous than the above:
    • It follows a similar process, except with a call claiming that Microsoft or the tech support company is shutting down, moving, or your "subscription" is "expiring", and needs to give back your money.
    • For some reason, as usual, this requires connecting to your computer directly using remote access software, and the Chrome web browser. But more importantly, they need a remote control program with the ability to blank the screen.
    • Sometimes the scammer may direct the caller to the aforementioned GoToAssist and set up a second program after they log in, or ask the caller to install the software themselves. A notable quirk at one point was their frequent insistence on using very specific, outdated versions of TeamViewer (newer versions had begun to add warnings about scams), but other programs such as AnyDesk are often used instead.
    • Eventually, they ask that you go to your online banking service to perform the "transfer". Then they blank out the screen (for "security" purposes) while they literally use the "Inspect element" tool (a web development tool in most current web browsers, intended for letting coders look through their HTML, CSS, and Javascript among others) to change the value of your balance on the page to "add" money to it (which is only changing the page as rendered and has no real effect). Occasionally, they will instead try to set up a diversion (such as ask you to write something down or check something else) instead.
    • But then, they say they "discover" that they gave you too much money by accident, and say you need to send them back the difference.
    • Sometimes it blatantly uses a demo site from Chase Bank, edited in a similar manner, to show their end.
    • A more recent variation adds an additional step during the transfer phase. Instead of pretending to do the transfer themselves, the scammer will bring up a simple program they claim is a "banking server", and ask the victim to enter their details and the refund amount. As the victim types that amount, the scammer will quickly add the extra digit and submit, making it seem like the mistake is the victim’s fault.
  • The Social Security scams are frequently mocked on the stream for being extremely formulaic. The gist is that criminal activity has been linked to the victim's Social Security Number, and they must pay to get a new one. Almost every call has the exact same crime: 22 pounds of cocaine has been found in a car "on the south border of Texas" (often a Toyota Corolla), traceable to the victim's identity, and bank accounts connected to the victim have been used to launder money.
  • The Airline Ticket scams take advantage of the fact that flights are a relatively common high-value purchase that can still be plausibly purchased over the phone. These scams typically come in one of two flavors: Either offer an absurdly large discount in exchange for a dubious payment method, or overcharge the price of a ticket and keep the extra money for yourself.
• Reference Overdosed: Memes are brought up often, but usually in such a casual and subtle manner that it seems very natural. Lampshaded by the fact that the stream has a "memometer" controlled by viewers using a corresponding subscriber emote in the chat, typically when these references or other running gags occur.
  • References to Runescape are also occasional in a similar manner.
  • Stream viewer DigitalSketch made a new supermarket backdrop for the non-tech support calls, which is similarly filled with references to running gags and past streams.
  • Kitboga has mentioned that the Futurama episode "Fear of a Bot Planet" is his favorite, and makes scammers take the "Robot Test" from that episode whenever he has an excuse to work it in.
  • Kitboga fairly regularly references the "top 10 anime betrayals" when the scammers pull out something especially twisted during a scambait call.
• Rickroll:
  • As of 2023, one way that scammers try to get money is to send a victim to a Bitcoin ATM to buy a large amount of Bitcoin. They then ask for the QR code from the receipt and make off with the Bitcoin. In this video, Kitboga trolls the scammer by sending a receipt with a QR code that instead rickrolls him. Although he and the viewers don't get to have the pleasure of listening to the scammer hear "Never Gonna Give You Up" over the phone, Kit nevertheless has tracking on the code and thus is able to verify that the scammer and/or one of his buddies did use it and thus got rickrolled.
  • Also in 2023, Kitboga and his team created the "gauntlet," a series of hoops which scammers are made to jump through in the hopes of claiming Bitcoin, but which is actually just designed to waste their time. One of these involves calling into an automated phone line, in which they sit through a long amount of hold music, every so often being asked to say a complicated phrase that is not easy for non-native English speakers. The line eventually terminates in something like them receiving a message saying that the mailbox is full, followed by them being asked to rate the service. The hold music is a series of various instrumental remixes of "Never Gonna Give You Up."
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: In one instance, a scammer directed Kitboga to install a 32-bit version of TeamViewer, which didn't work right, because his computer uses a 64-bit version of Windows. Because it wasn't working right, the scammer became convinced that he was talking to a scambaiter, which was true, but didn't have anything to do with why TeamViewer wasn't working properly.
• Ripped from the Headlines: A few scripts make subtle references to real life events as a way of improving the validity of the scam. For a while, most 'hackers' would be from Russia thanks to Russian cyber-attacks being a hot topic in the late 2010's. After rising tensions between the US and Iran in early 2020, at least one scammer decided that these hackers suddenly originated from Iran instead.
• Rudely Hanging Up: This is the typical ultimate endpoint of any call once the scammers realize just how badly their time has been wasted. The trick is how long they can be kept on the line before then. Additionally, Kitboga loves doing this himself to scammers because it drives them nuts. One of the things scammers try to insist on is that their potential victim remain on the line with them until everything is completed. Any time spent off the phone with them is time potentially outside their control in which somebody could be convincing their victim that they're being scammed. Of course, the risk is also there that the scammer will catch on or give up and either won't call back or won't take a call-back. Therefore, Kitboga usually only does this after the scammer has been well and truly baited into expecting a big payday.
• Rule of Funny: Kit has admitted that especially when it comes to some of his characters who surely aren't as feeble-minded as Granny Edna, the fake gift card redeem becomes less believable because there's no clear reason why his character shoud reasonably think that redeeming the gift cards on their own account is how the scammer could possibly get money. He still does it anyway because, of course, it's hilarious and it also infuriates the scammers in a way nothing else quite can.
• Running Gag:
  • Mayonnaise
  • Naked mole rats and goats often come up too.
  • And "Ocean Man", although it's pretty much a general meme to begin with. Kit's fake online bank for the refund scam was "Ocean Main" at one point, though he had to scrap it for "L. R. Jenkins Financial" after "Kitboga" started showing up next to it on Google's autocomplete box.
    • Having to change the name and design of the fake bank after the scammers begin to recognize it has become a running gag in general; it later changed to "Gull & Bull Financial". After that, it became "Second Community American Mutual". One scene of the outside of the bank lists on its sign "Formerly Gull & Bull Financial, Formerly L.R. Jenkins, Sometimes Chase Bank" He eventually just started spoofing a regular bank's website in order to make it more believable.
  • The characters also sometimes bring up their support of conspiracy theories.
    Jeb: What in God's green Flat Earth is this?
  • The "Chicago Art Museum" became this after a scammer claiming to work in Atlanta said that they frequently visited it when asked. It has become a custom to ask every scammer claiming to be in the United States if they enjoy going to the Chicago Art Museum.^note Chicago has multiple art museums, but none actually called the Chicago Art Museum - the most famous is actually called "the Art Institute of Chicago".
  • Happy Anniversary! It has become custom to celebrate hourly milestones on lengthy calls by wishing the scammer a happy anniversary, often with zero context.
  • Sometimes the refund scams send victims to a blatantly fake "form" hosted on Wix (because everyone knows Microsoft's customer service department uses a free web hosting service and not their own servers) that lists out the "options" for receiving the money. Kit sometimes edits the description for bank transfers behind their backs to add a ton of additional superlatives, and has the character coax the caller to read it for them.
  • Mentioning the names of once-major companies that are now either totally or almost totally out of business as possible sources for gift cards or types of gift cards to use, such as Toys R Us, Radio Shack and Circuit City. Olive Garden is also mentioned quite frequently for some reason.
  • Computer desktops with bizarre background images and loaded down with shortcut icons that are often a copy or a copy of a copy, as well as stuff like AOL and random oddities like "Making Diapers."
  • Speaking in a language such as Spanish or German when he hears the scammers speaking in Hindi, or asking the scammers if they're speaking in a foreign language, usually when the scammers are distracted by infighting.
  • Asking "Steve?" whenever a scammer gets particularly angry as a reference to Steve, widely regarded as the angriest scammer he ever called.
  • Making occasional random references to "Miller" following a puppy scam in which a puppy named Miller was supposedly backordered.
  • Tech support scammers like to make the claim that the potential victim's network is "compromised" and then ask them to list all devices that are connected to it. Kit likes to waste the time of these by listing various devices that aren't smart devices, sometimes claiming that they are actually are smart devices and are connected to the network, such as toasters or a swimming pool.
  • When running a refund scam, the scammers often like to open the command prompt and claim that is a "refund portal" or "bank portal." They tell the victim to type stuff, but not hit enter. Kitboga likes to ignore this and hit enter in order to force it to display "X is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file" to expose them to the audience, make them worried and get them raging about him not following instructions.
• Sarcastic Clapping:
  • Kitboga does this in "Buying Hot Dogs Instead of Gift Cards (for Scammers)" after the scammer completes the portion of the scam of claiming to have accidentally transferred way too much money to his bank account.
    Scammer: What are you doing? Are you clapping at me?
  • In "Scammer Loses Her Mind Over $10,000 Mistake" (a.k.a. "Do Not cut the Cards"), the scammer, Kelly, does this after Kitboga's character, Dawn Dewitt (Granny Edna) states that she has finished cutting up the last gift card.
• Schmuck Bait: A few traps on the virtual machine must be initiated by the scammer:
  • The "Nudes" folder hidden among the computer's documents. It features a gallery of Naked Mole-rats.
  • The webcam is coded to be stuck in a perpetual loading loop. (With, of course, the exception of those videos in which he purposely chats with scammers via webcam, in which he sends a purposely highly pixelated image. Or, in latter installments, deepfakes that depict him as an old man or woman.) Attempting to bypass it will result in a screamer featuring an image of a naked mole-rat.
  • Among the files on the computer's desktop is one named 'Passwords.txt'. Attempting to open it will cause error messages to pop up and be replaced with an exponentially increasing frequency as the scammer tries to close them.
  • Kit, in character, will at times tempt the scammers into doing a direct bank transfer to send them the money, which requires them giving Kit their bank account info. This is because Kit has actual real-life contacts that can investigate and shut down these accounts. Most of them don't take the bait, but those who do have a nasty surprise waiting for them in the near future. In 2021, he seriously ramped this up, managing to obtain over 100 bank accounts and even configuring an AI to accomplish this task.
  • One of Kit's tricks is to very casually claim to have purchased a number of Bitcoins (sometimes mispronouncing it as "Bitecoin") years ago, but not really caring about it now because surely it's worthless or "fake money," then telling the scammer that they're kidding when they explain that his character is a millionaire and doesn't even know it. If the scammer bites, this will then be supplemented by a fake Kraken (Bitcoin wallet) website, similar to Kit's fake bank accounts. It will show Kit as having just over a million dollars in Bitcoin, which the scammers will then scramble to try to claim for themselves.
• Sham Wedding: In "I Got Married... To a Scammer!," Kitboga, well, gets married to a scammer. Except, of course, that his guest, MiltonTPike, isn't actually a priest or any sort of official and can't actually marry anyone. And, of course, that it's not possible to marry someone over the phone without any documentation or an actual ceremony. And that none of the people on the line are who they actually claim to be.
• Shout-Out: The name "Kitboga" came from Age of Empires II, where it was one of the names for a Mongol AI. That name in turn came from an alternate spelling for the Naiman lieutenant Kitbuqa.
• Show Within a Show: A convoluted version: Kit sometimes streams himself playing GTA Online (on the NoPixel roleplay server) as Edna. Within the narrative of the roleplay, Edna is a cantankerous grandmother who works in Los Santos as a Clueless Detective, wants to run for chief of police, and drives a taxi on the side.
• Signature Move: Pretending to redeem Google Play gift cards that scammers wanted using a fake Google Play store right before their very eyes. He's had to dial back on it due to concerns of it becoming recognizable, but when it works there's nothing quite like it for triggering pure scammer rage and screaming fits.
• Sinister Minister: In "Scammers Hated Us After This 7hr Prank," WillNeff's Pastor Stewart character seems like a nice guy who is concerned about Kitboga's Mary character's health and brings her soup and such. But he also has Mary, a befuddled old lady, handling church finances and later he gives her "$500 gift cards" that are actually just $5 gift cards with two zeros written in after the 5s.
• Slow-Loading Internet Image: One of the options available on the virtual machine is the ability to make webpages load comically slow. In general, he also has Internet Explorer configured to not load images, in case a scammer tries to pull up NSFW images as revenge (and they have done that before). Sometimes, Kit will claim that either of those traits is what's wrong with the computer, just to watch the scammer stumble around as they are clueless when faced with an actual tech issue. A few times, the scammer actually has fixed this.
• Smug Snake: Numerous scammers consider themselves to be extremely good at what they do, and are extremely arrogant towards Kit and his characters; this makes it all the more gratifying to watch the scammers reach their Rage Breaking Point and witness their excuse for a facade come tumbling down.
• Snake Oil Salesman:
  • If the scammer isn't simply taking the money and running, they'll typically be this. In one instance a scammer proceeded to "fix" the computer apparently believing they had been paid $500; it turned out to involve little more than clearing out a few junk folders and installing free software.
  • A far more classic example showed up in 2020, when Kit called a number claiming to sell a Coronavirus remedy. It has everything you'd expect: making lofty claims about the benefits of the product (including it being a cure or vaccine) while remaining ambiguous enough so that they can fall back on Plausible Deniability, "Essential Oils" and other fruits and herbs being key ingredients, and treating it as a scarce commodity despite the obvious benefits of making it widely available.
• Special Guest: Kit will occasionally bring guests on to play a second character on calls. Fellow streamer MiltonTPike1 is the most frequent guest, but he has also had the likes of Herman Li, Misha Mansoor, voice actor Elspeth Eastman, Felicia Day, and Thomas Middleditch on the show. Kit himself has shown up as a special guest on group scambaiting projects with other baiters such as Trilogy Media and IRLRosie as well.
• Stating the Simple Solution: A regular fixture of calls is Kit pointing out the numerous much more simple and legitimate ways of solving the problems that scammers insist on using utterly convoluted and nonsensical methods to deal with.
  • Episode 2 of Baited - "The Professional," features a standard refund scam in which supposedly too much money is transferred into Kitboga's fake bank and he needs to return it via gift cards. He spends over a half-hour running the scammer in circles, suggesting other, simpler methods by which they could get it sorted out, such as simply transferring the money back to him, or calling his bank.
  • A crowning moment is on one stream where the scammer made the usual bank transfer between Kit's accounts without blanking the screen first, allowing Kit to see what he was doing even in-character. Because of this, Edna was able to solve the whole transfer issue in a couple of seconds just by repeating the transfer in the opposite direction.
• Strictly Formula: The tech support scams are considered so formulaic that for a long time, Kit had a Speedrun style overlay with split times for specific points in the scam ("Initial Bait", "Connect to PC", "Find Virus/Hack", "Explain", "Pricing/Options", "Payment Details", "Transfer To Boss" and "Reaction"). However, as he began branching out into exploring more types of scams, as well as specializing more often in "refund scams," he eventually dropped the checkpoints from the overlay and left just the overall timer. During the Adam and Alex saga, "Baited," in which he wasted over 36 hours of scammer time, he eventually stopped bothering with the various elements, such that by the end the entire 36+ hours was displayed under "Initial Bait."
• Stupid Evil: Well, they're scammers, so they tend to be both evil and stupid, but there are some standout moments:
  • On a few occasions when Kit gives pushback between the mistaken transfer and obtaining gift card steps, the scammers will retaliate by pretending to completely drain Kit's bank accounts of money. As Kit often points out to the audience whenever they do this, this is an incredibly dumb move for so many reasons, not least of which because it gives the victim every reason not to trust them before they've even succeeded at getting anything. There's also the logical hole of how the victim is supposed to buy the scammer gift cards if all of their money is gone, or why the scammer should need gift cards at all if they can just take all of the money they want on a whim.
  • On one call after revealing the whole thing to be scambait, the scammer insisted on trying to mess with Kit's computer, even though the fact that it was scambait should've made clear that they hadn't been given access to anything of importance, meaning they were actively wasting even more of their own time on a petty and utterly useless attempt at revenge. Not only that, but their method of messing with him was deleting shortcuts from his desktop one at a time.
  • In "When Scammers Pretend to Be Doctors," Kitboga's Nevaeh character tells the scammers to do her job if they want to save theirs. They actually do so, which involves calling up "patients" (other characters of Kitboga) and asking them ridiculous questions including whether they're having "loose or firm motions," how often they have bowel movements and whether or not they have certain conditions such as "follicle molderation" or "Counter Strike Syndrome." Towards the end of the bait, Kitboga plays that Nevaeh has figured out exactly how the "refund" scam works in terms of the scammers editing the HTML on the bank account, even stating outright to the scammer exactly how it works. Yet, they still try to maintain that they haven't done anything wrong and keep going trying to get gift card codes from "Nevaeh."
• Suckiness Is Painful:
  • After about an hour and twenty minutes into "Buying Hot Dogs Instead of Gift Cards (For Scammers)," Kitboga can't help but note that the scammers still having managed to pretend to send any money to his bank account and can't figure out the screen-sharing software they're using and are trying to install another. He points out that while he's trying to waste their time, the whole thing is just getting a bit ridiculous that they're so incompetent they're wasting their own time.
  • In "When Scammer Think You're a Bitcoin Millionaire," Kitboga tricks a group of refund scammers into believing that his character has just over a million dollars in Bitcoin. After leaving them on this, he ends the call for the day. When they call back the next day, he's astonished to the point of near speechlessness and having to compose himself of the fact that instead of coming up with anything even remotely creative, they just try to run the standard refund scam, and rather badly too. The fact that he ends up spending nearly 7 hours total on the phone with them is a testament to their sheer persistence more than anything else, as he tries to simply end things with them several times due to not wanting to waste time on ineffective scammers.
• Suddenly Shouting: In "Scammer Cries After Losing $5,000 to Virus" (a.k.a. "3 Slice Lisa,") Kitboga's Marsha Mallow (Granny Edna) character does this after Lisa says that she "ruined everything" by redeeming a Google Play card.
  Marsha: Because I wanted to help you and now you have the audacity to say that I ruined everything?! What's wrong with you?! You're just like the other girls!
• Sunglasses at Night: He wears sunglasses almost all the time during his streams in order to conceal his identity. Since some of the streams take place at night, this applies here, as well as more generally the fact that he is pretty much always shown wearing them.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy:
  • A major reason why scambaiting works. In general, the longer a scammer has spent on the phone, the more likely they are to accept whatever crazy stuff Kit throws at them. On a few cases, scammers have tried to continue the scam even after Kit has seemingly revealed to them, just because they refuse to believe that all their time was for nothing.
  • At one point during a conservation with Adam and Alex, part of a group of four scammers that wasted 36 hours on him, Kitboga as Edna actually mentions the sunk cost fallacy by name, asking if they're familiar with it. They just ignore it.
• Sure, Let's Go with That:
  • Many scammers will play along with anything (often begrudgingly) if they think they'll get money out of it.
  • On occasion, when the scammer's story completely falls apart beyond anyone's ability to plausibly believe early on, yet persist with the call anyway, Kit will ultimately just go along with the next part of the scam despite having no in-character reason to, just to continue wasting their time and stringing them along.
• Surprise Party: At one point in "Kitboga Meets the President," Kitboga's Barb character (Granny Enda) claims to have thrown a surprise party for herself. The tortured logic given for this is that supposedly the couple hundred people she invited thought she didn't know that it was her birthday.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: It's not uncommon for scammers to get weirdly defensive if Kit mentions scams in passing, without even implicating them in anything.
• Sustained Misunderstanding: This is the thrust of the gag in "Do Not Cut The Cards." The scammer, Kristin, at one point tells Kitboga and guest streamer Veritas to go out and buy "four pieces of $500 Best Buy gift cards." This is a fairly common bit of scammer phrasing that arises from the fact that English is not their first language, but rather Hindi. (A native-English speaker would normally just say "four $500 Best Buy gift cards.") Veritas purposefully misunderstands this as cutting up the cards into four pieces and Kitboga's Dawn Dewitt (Granny Edna, supposedly his wife), latches on to this. They then milk the gag for all it's worth, pretending to go to the store and get the gift cards, then tell the scammer that they're cutting them up, that's like an infinite money hack. She goes ballistic, convinced that her payday is being cut up into little pieces.
• Technobabble: One of the standard tactics of the tech support and refund scammers is to use terms such as "refund server" and "foreign connections," which sound like something important, but are actually meaningless or don't mean what they claim them to mean. Kit likes to parody this by having his rival scammer characters, such as Daniel and Josh, use even more ridiculous technobabble terms which gets the scammers' blood boiling as they shout for him to stop talking nonsense.
• Tempting Fate: Whenever a scammer says their "process" won't take long...
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": On one call, the scammer uses syskey — an obscure and now-deprecated Windows NT utility used for setting startup passwords, but now primarily used as a form of ransomware during these phone scams (hence its removal from Windows 10) — to lock Kit out of Windows. He manages to guess the password on his first try. The password? "1234".
• The Stoner: Played for Drama, as Kit occasionally notes that drug use isn't uncommon in call centres. While it's almost impossible to get a definitive confirmation, an uncomfortably large number of scammers have answered the phone while being completely absent-minded, to the point where they are almost incapable of doing their job.
• Thick-Line Animation: This is the animation style used in the animated series for G4, as seen here.
• Tinfoil Hat: Kit wears one during portions of "Scam Call Turns NUCLEAR Over $1M" to reinforce the idea of an old lady in a home where her husband is conducting dangerous experiments with a daisy-chain of microwaves, hoping to create the world's first macrowave.
• Too Dumb to Fool: The shtick of all Kit’s characters, who seem like they should be easy targets but somehow can’t ever manage to follow the scammers’ instructions well enough to be successfully fleeced. Of course, this is fully intentional.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Kit is an avid tea drinker. In fact, before he officially gets started on every stream, he invites viewers to drink whatever they have near them (preferably tea) in unity. He insists that it's not a cult.
  • Among his characters, mayonnaise happens to come up often.
  • For a time, carrots seemed to be brought up quite a bit.
• Tranquil Fury: This is Kit's default way of expressing anger. Many of the scams make Kit exceptionally angry, especially when the scammers attempt to bully Edna, who they believe to be an elderly woman, or when scammers display enough competence to be more dangerous than usual. Kit hides his rage well when in-character, but out of character his voice becomes quieter and more measured the more angry he gets, with the peak of his rage rendering him entirely speechless and forcing him to have to move away from the mic and regain his composure. Kit almost never yells, screams, or curses at the scammers, no matter how angry he gets. On the rare occasions he ever actually does yell, it's only because it would be in character to do so and he often assures the viewers afterwards that he isn't actually angry.
• Tricked into Signing: In "Telling an Investment Scammer I Actually Got the Money," part of the scam is the scammer providing a document which both the victim and the scammer are supposed to sign in order make things more legitimate. It is, of course, nonsense, since once the scammer gets the money from the victim, they will cut and run. Kitboga modifies the document so that it specifies certain terms such as the scammer being required to chat with him on a 15 minute video call and provide him with five $100 Olive Garden gift cards upon signing, knowing that the scammer won't read it. Of course, given that it's a scammer, Kit has no way of enforcing this either, but he tries to humiliate the scammer by having him read out loud what he signed.
• Trust Password: A common tactic of certain scammers is to set up a password with the victim and then the victim isn't supposed to answer any calls unless the caller is able to give the password. For Kitboga, this is just another opportunity for more fun, making up ridiculous passwords like "I love the mailman" or hanging up if they are even slightly off with the password.
• Umpteenth Customer: In "Scammer Wastes Entire Day Expecting My $2,000," a popup has a phone number to call for virus cleaning. Daniel the scammer claims that it's a 1000th customer promotion.
• Ungrateful Bastard: When the scammers start raging after a Google Play gift card redeem, Kitboga will generally treat them as this, saying that they should be thanking him for saving their job.
• Vanity License Plate: One of Kitboga's green-screened backgrounds features him inside a car with a license plate that reads "kitboga" for the state and the vanity plate number "NOSC4MBR0."
• Verbal Tic:
  • Scammers often seem to pepper in "Sir", "Ma'am", or the like into their speech an inordinate amount, even when they're angrily cussing out Kit's characters. At least once, the scammer defaulted to using "Sir" to refer to a female character, leading Kit to correct him multiple times throughout their interactions and at one point flat-out hanging up on him in in-character anger.
  • For some inexplicable reason, nearly all scammers refer to going to jail as "be behind the bars", instead of just "be behind bars," or more simply, "in jail."
• Villainous Breakdown: The most successful calls often have the scammer completely lose it in desperation or anger by the end of it, at times even going into a catatonic silence as they realize just how much time they wasted.
• We Need a Distraction:
  • During the refund scam, the perpetrator will generally make up some excuse for the victim to go away from their computer so they have an easier time manipulating the webpage. Asking the victim to grab something to write on ("Are you handy with a pen and a piece of paper?"), or to check their router and describe its lights/serial number are the most common requests.
  • In the record 36-hour scamming attempt, the scammers repeatedly scream down the line that Matilda's computer is about to explode. It's missed during the first entry in the series, but played up by Kit to hilarious effect when the scammers attempt it again several streams later
• Weird Currency: Gift cards, usually iTunes or Google Play, are often the required method for paying scammers owing to them being relatively easy to launder. A lot of Blatant Lies get thrown around for why you need to pay taxes or buy airplane tickets with them; some excuses have included trying to pass them off as 'Electronic Federal Tax Vouchers', or claiming that Google is a 'Payment Partner'. Notably, even the scammers seem to be aware of how ridiculous this is; often they will wait for as long as they can before revealing that they need a specific gift card.
• What's a Henway?:
  • "Do you take Updog cards?" The "Updog" gag has worked from time to time. His aforementioned fake bank was also "Updog Financial" at one point.
  • When the scammers ask to set a Trust Password, Kitboga often asks to set this as "I Cup," - ICUP.
    Kitboga: Spell that.
    Scammer: I c u p. ("I see you pee.")
    Kitboga: Disgusting.
• Would Harm a Senior: The scammers featured in his videos have no issue threatening physical violence against Edna for not playing along with their scams.
• You Talk Too Much!: A common scammer attitude after spending some time with one of Kitboga's characters. At least a couple have said it directly, with others, you can simply tell.

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Roses are red, scammers are screaming. WHY THE F*CK ARE YOU REDEEMING?!

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