Quick Facts
Biography
Kitboga is an American Twitch streamer and YouTuber whose content primarily focuses on scambaiting. As of April 2020, his channel has gained over 630,000 followers on Twitch and his YouTube channel has over 840,000 subscribers.
Premise
Kitboga began scambaiting in mid-2017 after he found out that his grandmother was a victim of many types of scams designed to prey on the elderly, both online and in person. He holds that, by wasting the time of scammers, he is preventing them from scamming others and is also providing a source of entertainment and education to his viewers. In doing so, he mixes elements of popular culture into his dialogue during scam calls.
Scambaiting
In his videos, Kitboga engages in scambaiting several different types of scammers. Besides technical support scammers, he also engages with refund scammers, IRS scammers, and others.
To keep scammers away from his real identity, as well as for viewer entertainment, Kitboga often acts as a number of characters during his videos, including an 80-year-old grandmother named Edna, a Russian man named Vicktor Viktoor, a valley girl named Nevaeh, or sometimes even a competing technical support scammer. He does this by imitating the accent or vocal intonation of the character he is trying to portray, in addition to oftentimes using a voice changer to alter the pitch of his voice. However, the common factor uniting all these characters is that they are not computer-savvy, giving the scammer confidence that the would-be victim is more likely to fall for the ruse.
The calls often last until the scammer gets extremely frustrated with him and hangs up. He wants to make the scammer feel as if the scam's failure was their fault, not his.
Characters
With the use of some hardware voice changer (Roland VT-3 and GoXLR) and different accents, Kitboga role-plays multiple characters, often related to each other. Different names are frequently used for the characters below. Also, his friend and streaming colleague "MiltonTPike1" supports him occasionally as a guest voice. Furthermore, he announced that he's in contact with a voice coach to create new characters with different accents.
| Name | Age | Voice type | Gender | Description / Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chad | 20s | Stereotypical Chad | Male | Mostly as a big brother or co-worker. |
| Daniel | 20s | Normal voice | Male | Scammer who works for "World Wide Web Wide Web Tech Professionals". |
| Dixie | 40s | Southern | Female | Sometimes a cashier or employee in a random store and wife of Jebediah. |
| Edmund | 70-85 | Senior | Male | Male equivalent to Edna. |
| Edna | 70-85 | Senior | Female | Typical grandma and mother of Dixie. Sometimes under the name of "Matilda" instead. She has a cat called "Mr. Whiskas". |
| Jebediah | 40s | Southern | Male | Propane salesman, believes the Earth is flat. |
| Tyler | 12-14 | Teen (puberty) | Male | Parody of the cartoon character Morty from Rick and Morty. Also used as son (Bobby), grandson or younger brother. |
| Nevaeh | 20s | Valley girl | Female | Hand model on Instagram, single and sometimes a store intern. Often brings up the topic of how her name is "Heaven" spelled backward. |
| Victor | 30s | Russian (often influenced by German) | Male | Mostly a side character (friend or neighbor) and sometimes a store or bank employee. |
The following is a simplistic family tree to symbolize the (often used) relationship between the different characters.
| Edna | Edmund | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dixie | Jebediah | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chad | Nevaeh | Tyler | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
- NOTE: Daniel and Victor are mostly used as support characters, in the form of a friend, employee or scammer.
Characteristics
Identity
Having received death threats amid other serious reactions after coming clean after a scam call, Kitboga maintains that it is essential to keep his identity a secret online. As such, he has worn dark sunglasses since the beginning of his Twitch channel; now, however, he only wears them when actively scambaiting and as a running joke on his channel.
Records
Kitboga has had scammers "Adam Smith" and "Alex" (presumably not their real names), with interventions of a few other scammers (bosses, co-workers and rival scammers), on the phone for 42 hours, over several days, with over 1,500 callbacks and approximately 12.5 hours of additional time wasted by the scammers.
Representation
On March 23, 2018, Kitboga announced that he is being represented by talent management firm, Online Performers Group.