World-Wide-Vigilance: Netizens Against Trans-Spatial Scams in the Digital Age

Based on https://unsplash.com/photos/purple-and-blue-light-digital-wallpaper-8bghKxNU1j0
Zapping through the billions of hours of content on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, I came across a certain niche of content that seems to have attracted quite the audience: Vigilant Watchman of the Digital Age. The World Wide Web, with its many digital places of community and conviviality, provides another interesting avenue to study the phenomenon of Vigilance.1 Vigilance here describes how individual attention is functionally coupled to supra-individual societal goals. In this short form essay, I am going to ask how vigilant online communities are created. I will elucidate a network of actors who transcend the lines between digital and physical spaces, that dedicate themselves to the fight against contemporary forms of trans-spatial crime, in what I call World Wide Vigilance. To do so, I will highlight three actors introduced below. All of them were to some extent involved in independently investigating, uncovering and combating (cyber-)crime. Yet, all three follow distinctly different goals, ranging from comedy and entertainment to serious citizen journalism, and crime prevention education. I will argue that their content fosters a culture of vigilance on the world wide web. One of the reasons why this phenomenon has come to attention, especially in recent years, might be that in the absence of stringent state regulation the internet has essentially created a world wild west. In this context, vigilance is necessary to navigate its fragile equilibrium of (dis-)order.
This rabbit hole starts with one of YouTube’s most famous creators, Mark Rober (60 million subscribers).2 Mark, a former NASA engineer, is mostly known as an educational entertainer explaining engineering essentials to kids. His usual content involves fun science tricks for children/youngsters, or building parkour challenges for the squirrels in his backyard. However, in one of his most popular series – the so-called “Glitterbomb Series” (see Image 1) –, he puts his engineering prowess to an interesting use. Frustrated by the actions of so-called “porch pirates”, individuals stealing deposited packages waiting for pickup, who nabbed a package waiting for him at his front door, he decides to do something about them. In comes his “glitterbomb”. This trap punishes package bandits in the style of “Home Alone” with hilarious – mostly harmless – pranks, like exploding with glitter in their faces, scaring them with fake police chatter, or spraying them with foul-smelling fart spray. His endeavors eventually evolved, and a comprehensive cooperation with law enforcement emerged to investigate the obscure organizations orchestrating the ongoing plundering frenzy. Eventually, he participated in a sting operation, that involved sending his glitterbombs to call-centers in India that were perpetuating scams.

This then also leads me to the next creator, who also participated in this international public-private policing operation: YouTuber Scammer Payback (7.8 million subscribers)3, who also goes by the screen name “Pierogi”. His video titles usually include phrases like “How I Outsmarted Scammers”, “Scaring Scammers with Their Real Names”, or “Scammer BEGS For His Deleted Files As I Drink His Tears” (see Image 2). He specializes in the counteroffensive against phone scammers. In his livestreams he is usually on the phone with a scammer, impersonating helpless senior citizens to lure them into his traps. These phone scammers are trying to impersonate the employees of bigger tech firms, or sometimes family members, to get mostly senior citizens to transfer money to fraudulent accounts. Often this involves either getting them to send cash, buy gift cards, or stealing the login information to their online banking accounts. In comes Pierogi. Once he gets a scammer on the line he tries to engage them in conversations, where he deliberately plays dumb to drive them crazy. Moreover, if given the chance, he tries to use the scammers’ tricks against them – they frequently try to connect to one’s PC over screen sharing software – to gain access to their machines. When successful, he then proceeds to silently extract data from previous and potential victims . He then uses it to warn and help victims or connect them with the relevant authorities. Also he tries to gain access to the internal networks, or cause the scammer to panic by deleting their files. Yet, besides these mostly harmless and inconsequential pranks Scammer Payback aka Pierogi pulls on the scammers, his achievements also include assembling a team of volunteers to combat fraudulent activity, warning victims, and successful cooperation with law enforcement across multiple countries, i.e., the US and India, to shut down con call centers and take them offline.

Over time, the algorithm has also brought me to citizen journalist and self proclaimed internet detective Coffeezilla aka Stephen Findeisen (3.8 million subscribers)4, who – while not formally connected to the other two – has independently become famous for reporting on cryptocurrency scams. His content includes the alleged fraudulent business activities in the decentralized finance sector, i.e., the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto brokerage FTX, or ethics violations by fellow creators on YouTube during the crypto gold rush of recent years (see Image 3). He is most famous for uncovering the scams and alleged financial fraud of many famous influencers. They allegedly (sometimes repeatedly) “pumped and dumped” cryptocurrencies by promoting them to their audiences comprising young adults or even children, leaving them to “hold the bag”, while making off “to the moon” with their “diamond hands”.5 While infrequent, some of his investigations have also had real consequences for alleged fraudsters who have been thrust in the spotlight by the heightened pressure put on them by him and his online following. Yet, many of the cases he reported were never criminally investigated and have remained in legal limbo for years now. Eventually, in some of the cases he covered the alleged scammers lost the trust of their online communities, thus potentially cutting them off from further revenue. Over the years Coffeezilla has become a respected figure in the online community of YouTube, whose word has significant weight, when weighing in on scandals, as can be seen with the most recent case involving YouTube’s biggest creator MrBeast.

As different as the content of these three creators might be, as a scholar of Vigilance, I see a common thread binding them together: They are presenting themselves as vigilant watchmen of the digital age.6 So, how is vigilance created in the content of these three creators?
In his video Mark Rober emphasizes in his usual fun tone the seriousness of the “porch pirate” problem, raising awareness to his audience of millions worldwide. In this process the individual attention is scaled up to a level of constant vigilance. In his messaging he interweaves narratives of what a good moral citizen is with a call for vigilance. He uses his digital platform to direct attention towards new problems that have risen due to the popularity of online shopping, the unsafe modes of delivery, i.e., dropping packages off at the porch, created by the tight economic pressure and the constant lack of time faced by delivery divers. By articulating a call to action, he creates an intersection of individual attention and the vision of a better societal future that ultimately makes vigilance thrive.
Scammer Payback aka Pierogi states in his channel’s description: “Scammers are ruthless, and that is why I am here. My channel is all about bringing awareness to this critical problem with humor and fun. We will learn a lot of things along the way and if I help one person through this, it will be worth it.“7 The tenor of it is that scams are constantly and frequently happening, and that their latent threat could materialize onto us at any moment. Consequently, the viewers need to orient their attention towards the telltale signs to prevent them. Moreover, in his live streams he is educating and involving the viewers in an active “watch”, together they are on the digital patrol for scammers. By doing so, he creates a vigilant online community. Furthermore, this vigilant group is not only involving private citizens, as can be seen with his anti-scammer call center, but also evolving into a public-private partnership between them and law enforcement. Furthermore, these links are exactly what is to be expected from our perspective of Vigilance. No system can always cover its own blind spots, thus vigilant citizens are essential to effective and comprehensive policing.

Lastly, Coffeezilla orients the viewers’ attention towards the telltale signs of financial fraudsters in the crypto space. His style of citizen journalism is blending clearly articulated, well-researched and investigated arguments, with ethical guidance for a new age of cybercrime. Sometimes he advises the viewers at the end of his investigations to “stay careful out there”. Coffeezilla is directing the viewers’ attention towards crimes they might never even have heard of turning his community into watchmen of the digital age. By doing so, he is putting attention on events in what sometimes appears to be the lawless planes of the internet, where effective policing is often severely hindered by the transnational nature of the criminal networks perpetrating them,
To conclude this observation, all three examples exhibit different aspects of Vigilance on the internet. With their content, these influencers call upon the viewers to be vigilant, and to do their part in protecting their communities. They are pioneers of creating a culture of vigilance necessary for navigating the trans-spatial nature of digital and physical crime on the internet . Yet, we can assume there is also a functional reason for this uprise of vigilance-inducing content online. I hypothesize that they are directed toward the societal goal of safety and reliability of social expectations, which has become increasingly frail with the widespread use of the internet and crime related to and made possible by it. In the physical world we have come to expect that granting this safety net is the role of state institutions, e.g., law enforcement. However, we are forcefully and shockingly experiencing that all these rules often seem to be practically unenforceable by traditional means on the internet, due to its mostly anonymous and transnational nature. Here arises the need for constant vigilance on the world wide web. In this space where netizens seem to be free to scam others and is left to their own devices to protect their safety, these vigilant watchmen appealing to a set of seemingly unitary moral laws to channel the viewers’ attention. Needless to say, these viginfluencers are also profiting from their endeavors, as they can attract a significant number of clicks with the moral outrage they create. But through their activities they are also part of a motion to restore the fragile social equilibrium of trust in society. It is improbable that a society without crime could exist; however, individual agency can make a difference. This type of functionalized attention towards these trans-spatial scams is ultimately laying the groundwork for more effective law enforcement through vigilant public-private policing on the internet.
Cite this article as: Paul J. Kramer, “World-Wide-Vigilance: Netizens Against Trans-Spatial Scams in the Digital Age”. In: Vigilanzkulturen, 17.12.2024, https://vigilanz.hypotheses.org/?p=7398.
Find out more about Paul J. Kramer
- When talking about the theoretical perspective of Vigilance I will use the uppercase „Vigilance“ while when talking about being vigilant or it’s noun I will use the lowercase „vigilance“. In German this distinction is easy to understand, but when translating into English the terminology becomes more ambiguous. I hope this will make it easier to the readers of this essay to understand. [↩]
- https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRober as of 2024/12/04 [↩]
- https://www.youtube.com/@ScammerPayback as of 2024/12/04 [↩]
- https://www.youtube.com/@Coffeezilla as of 2024/12/04. He also owns another channel with 612000 subscribers called voidzilla, https://www.youtube.com/@coffeezillaextras. [↩]
- To understand these references, one must have followed the crypto online scene for a while. Many of these terms originated or were popularized in the subreddit r/wallstreetbets in the wake of the GameStop short-selling squeeze and crypto bull runs of 2020/2021. Very simply put, “holding the bag” means being the loser who has to take the losses, when the “people going to the moon” aka the winners of a (securities) trade sell their high valued stocks (which they held as “diamonds in their hand”), thus realizing their winning, while the losers can subsequently only watch the value of their assets go down. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ [↩]
- A more detailed version also was published in the 2024/1 “Mitteilungen”, the magazine of our research center. Fuschlberger, Pia, and Paul Johann Kramer. 2024. “»Attenzione Pickpocket!« Vigilante Appelle in Italien, Japan und der Frühen Neuzeit.” Mitteilungen, 19–29. https://doi.org/10.5282/ubm/epub.115662 [↩]
- https://www.youtube.com/@ScammerPayback see channel description as of 2024/12/04 [↩]
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Paul Johann Kramer (17. Dezember 2024). World-Wide-Vigilance: Netizens Against Trans-Spatial Scams in the Digital Age. Vigilanzkulturen. Abgerufen am 7. Februar 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/12xx6