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Full Diligence Post on DIGITAL TURBINE ($APPS) +650% in 1 year and a Hidden Monopoly

Wanted to share some of my research on Digital Turbine, which in my view isn’t getting enough attention. The company owns a monopoly in the pre-load app space, has a lot of exciting growth opportunities, and is a great long-term buy. The stock is up over 650% over the past 12 months, so the valuation does seem stretched, but I could see the stock going to $100 within the next 6-12 months if the next few earnings calls don’t disappoint.
Super long post, TLDR on the bottom.
What Does Digital Turbine Do?
Business Model
Growth Prospects
Financials
Risks & mitigations
What I’m Doing
Resources I looked at:
TLDR: Company owns a monopoly in the Android pre-load app space with partnerships with the largest carriers and OEMs in the world not named Apple; lots of good growth prospects including its recent acquisition + international expansion. Expensive stock fundamentally right now but good one to keep an eye on if there are any major dips. Strong buy in the $30s-40s. Medium buy in the $50s. Earnings call on February 3rd should materially move the stock either up or down so will be important to pay attention to that.
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NYT article on scammers.

Not really about Kitboga. The author talks to Jim Browning. Very interesting. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html
[Edit: adding the text of the article which was sent to me by a friend from a call center]
Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Image Murlidhar Sharma, a senior police official, whose team raided two call centers in Kolkata in October 2019 based on a complaint from Microsoft. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
Image The Garden Reach area in Kolkata. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
Image Aniruddha Nath spent a week on the job at a call center when he realized that it was engaged in fraud. A lack of other opportunities can make such call centers an appealing enterprise. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.
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NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

Fascinating piece published today by NY Times Magazine on scammer call centers in India. The reporter even tracks one scammer down, travels to India and confronts him. Link and article below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

Every year, tens of millions of Americans collectively lose billions of dollars to scam callers. Where does the other end of the line lead?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.
submitted by TheScumAlsoRises to Scams [link] [comments]

How can KIN grow in INDIA? India will be the app development Capitol of the World! How can I help???

NEWS about new investment and exchanges in INDIA- New Exchange Funding In India
Digital India is the government’s flagship program and has been transforming the country into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. The rate of technology adoption increased between 2013 and 2018, bolstered by government initiatives and mobile penetration. During this time, the country clocked 1.22 billion Aadhaar registrations, 870 million Aadhaar-linked bank accounts, and 98 million daily e-government transactions. Building on this foundation, India can further scale-up its digital economy.
According to a recent report, India has the potential to create over US $1 trillion of economic value from the digital economy by 2025, up from around US $200 billion currently.(Insert KIN)
India seems to be a very interesting place for growth in the app and development world. Fueled by a rapidly rising demand for services and content as more and more Indians go online using smartphones, the country’s app economy is poised for a strong growth, with the number of application developers being expected to surpass those in the US by 2024.
According to the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), India is expected to overtake the US as world’s largest developer population centre by 2024. A report by PPI reveals that India has 1.674 million app economy jobs as on August 2019, a growth of 39% from 1.208 million in 2016. By comparison, the US had 2.246 million similar jobs as on April 2019 and the European Union, including Switzerland and Norway, had 2.093 million jobs as of July 2019.
So if the developers are there and the tech is there and the thought of actually earning money in a digital economy is there.... KIN should be there as well- How can we make this opportunity blossom together???? Ideas? action steps? contacts ? How can we leverage the power of KIN into the hands of every single app and digital asset development company in INDIA? I would love to speak to someone at KIN about this and see how I can help start sending out emails and resources to people who will see the power of KIN and take this seriously- I would like to help in anyway I can in 2021 - Lets get to a Billion users this decade.. Who is with me? Just thinking ahead-- Cheers- Kevin_from_KIN reptar2015 wmouhayar
submitted by nugent77 to KinFoundation [link] [comments]

The most cited male privilege checklist is such bogus

I was scrolling through Instagram and I stumbled across a male privilege checklist most of you are probably aware of. However, me and a friend of mine (u/FinallyReborn) still wanted to cover its points here. I will segregate the post into two sections (part I which will be addressed by me and part II which is addressed by him). Also, the points are not in order, but I don't think that matters. What matters are the points themselves.

Part I

My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.
How do I begin to unpack this? - STEM favours women in a ratio of 2:1 - Blind hiring (that is the gender of the applicant is not known) favours men whereas non-blind recruitment favours women by a couple percentage points . - Men, on average, are more likely to be discriminated against when job hunting, which includes both male and female dominated jobs - This 2019 study also found discrimination against men in hiring. - This and this article on discrimination against women in science which examine more than hiring, find either no bias against women or more anti-male than anti-female bias in science.
The idea men won't face discrimination in hiring and the odds are skewed in their favour especially in prestigious fields like STEM is false. The narrative stems from gender stereotypes such as female vulnerability that expects women to always be the recipients of discriminaton or injustice which itself is a type of bias against men.
If I am never promoted, it's not because of my sex.
That's supported by? Most of the claims which are made in this checklist are either baseless or outright false and one-sided. (see above)
I am far less likely to face sexual harassment at work than are my female co-workers.
Perhaps, it is true "men are less likely to face sexual harassment" in the workplace, though I am skeptical of the word "far". Men represent 1 in 5 complaints of sexual harassment in the workplace in the US and the number could be heavily under-counted as men often under-report their abuse (here and here). Attitudes like this exist: "If a woman pats a man’s butt, admiringly asks whether he’s been working out, and suggestively compliments him on how good he looks, people chuckle. If the roles were reversed, those same people would be outraged (and rightfully so)". It could also be that men are less likely to be taken seriously and women are less likely to be viewed as perpetrators: "In the Horizon Oil Sands work camp in Alberta, men who are caught in women’s dorms are fired on the spot, while women are allowed in the men’s dorm rooms."
Harassment in general is reported to be proportionally equal for both sexes. This study looked at bullying at work and found that "men and women did not differ in prevalence". Another study looked at workplace bullying and found "no significant differences in the bullying experiences of men and women". A study in Sweden looked at the prevalence of mobbing in the workplace which is defined as "harassing, ganging up on someone, or psychologically terrorising others at work" and found "men (45%) and women (55%) are subjected [to workplace mobbing] in roughly equal proportions, the difference not being significant". A report by StatsCan found that "19% of women and 13% of men experienced workplace harassment in the past year".
If I'm a teen or adult, and if I stay out of prison, my odds of being raped are so low as to be negligible.
False. The odds of men being raped outside of prison (which is obviously excluded to prove a point) are not low or negligible (once you start to look at rape in a more nuanced manner and expand the definition of rape to be inclusive of victims who weren't penetrated and were instead forced to penetrate their perpetrators, the narrative crumbles apart). I also love how they say "if I stay out of prison" as if men simply choose to be in prison and there is no bias in sentencing and men's criminal behaviour is not a product of environmental causes like fatherlessness which is not true . To get back to the "the rape of men outside of prison which we will conveniently exclude because reasons is low to the point of being negligible" claim, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey would like to disagree: - The NISVS (2010) showed that during the proceeding 12 months of the survey, 1.1% of men were made to penetrate and 1.1% of women were raped. Table 2.1 and 2.2 pages 18-19. - The NISVS (2011) showed that in the past 12 months of the survey, 1.7% of men were made to penetrate and 1.0% of women were raped. Table 1, page 5. - The NISVS (2012) showed that in the past 12 months, 1.7% of men were made to penetrate and 1.2% of women were raped. Table A.1 and A.5 on pages 217 and 222. - The NISVS (2015) showed that in the past 12 months, 0.7% of men were made to penetrate and 1.2% of women were raped.
Just as a side note: we say made to penetrate instead of rape as the CDC does not consider made to penetrate to be rape and instead puts it in the category of sexual assault which leads to media under-reporting of the problem of the rape of men. The idea that the rape of men outside of prison is low or negligible is another myth that is rooted in gender norms which are again more advantageous to women as their victimisation is universally recognised whereas men's victimisation is swept under the rug. In case anybody brings up the fact that I am only quoting annual data and not lifetime data which found a high prevalence of male victimisation once made to penetrate is lumped in the same category as rape, I am doing that because lifetime data has less accuracy as it runs into more problems such as memory loss, confusion of events, how well one interpreted their victimisation which might have taken place long ago, etc... This source notes: "Research tells us that 20% of critical details are irretrievable after one year of their occurance and 50% are irretrievable after 5 years". This could heavily skew the data in favour of women as they are less likely to internalise their victimisation and more likely to report.
If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.
Incorrect. Here and here.
If I have children and provide primary care for them, I'll be praised for extraordinary parenting even if I'm marginally competent.
Assuming that's true (for the sake of argument), it is only half of the story - that is while there are fathers, single or married, who are praised for doing "mommy's work", often for a valid reason, there are also fathers who encounter day-to-day stereotypes and hardships for not living up to their traditional role of a provider. For instance, this survey found mothers are seen as better caregivers and fathers are more likely to be pressured to work more and be financially liable for their families. We can reason that if that's the case, then a man who breaks out of his gender role and takes on a "mother's job" will be seen as a deviant and often encounter negative stereotypes about his gender and his abilities will be put to question. This video interview (skip to 6:14) as the actual video has been made private describes motherhood which it synonymously links to parenthood as the "hardest job". Additionally, anybody who has spent some time on social media platforms such as Twitter can notice a pattern of people including verified accounts turning Father's Day into a day about single mothers or mothers in general. Therefore, it is quite absurd to say that a father who is marginally competent as a caregiver will receive extraordinary praise as opposed to a mother who does the same job better.
If I seek political office, my relationship with my children, or who I hire to care for them, will probably not be scrutinised by the press.
Unless, of course you're Donald Trump in which case everything you do will be examined by the media and used against you. This article analyses Donald Trump's realationship with his son, Barron Trump and this article goes on to examine how Trump's children grew up "relatively normal" as well as who took care of them, etc, etc....
I can be somewhat sure that if I ask to see "the person in charge", I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person, the surer I can be.
That benefits me, how? As a woman, if you go outside, the odds are the overwhelming majority of people at the bottom you will see such as construction workers, or the unsheltered homeless, will be men.
As a child, I could choose from an almost infinite variety of children's media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male protagonists were (are) the default.
As a child, I saw myself represented as an antagonist in almost every cartoon or TV show. The servants of each villain who were killed one after another like a disposable pile of garbage were also universally male. Such "servants" continue to be almost universally male as people prefer men dying in movies to women dying or being tortured. The "default protagonist" is not male either (Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Supergirl). The existence of male protagonists in most movies especially romantic ones encouraged boys to turn into risk taking or self-sacrificing men who leave their well-being behind to protect people especially women and children.
If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has sexist overtons.
Privilege is not defined or measured by one's inability to recognise whether somebody was sexist to them or not because of how normalised society's inability to spot misandry is. Privilege is having society pander to you and your issues to the point where you become paranoid and question everything or everybody for potentially being misogynistic to you and always blaming others for your misery because of how little accountability you are expected to take for your own problems. It is not "women caused their own issues", it is almost always "society or HE caused these issues" meanwhile for men it is almost always "he caused his own issues" or "other men caused his issues".
If I am careless with my financial affairs, it won't be attributed to my sex.
As a woman, if I am incapable of earning enough money or a high income, that won't be blamed on my sex's inability to provide.
I can speak to a large group of people without putting my sex on trial.
So can women. In fact, women can freely talk about raping men on a stage that is supposed to be empowering to women and treat it like a joke
There are value-neutral clothing choices available to me. It is possible for me to choose clothing that doesn't send any particular message to the world.
So it is for women. Women can also wear their boyfriends' casual clothing and still be seen as cute. A man wearing a dress or his girlfriend's clothing is enough for him to be called a "beta male emasculated cuck" by prominent political figures such as Candace Owens or even beaten up in more traditional countries whereas women can wear traditionally masculine clothing such as suits and nobody bats an eye. Men are also expected to wear clothing and accessories which signify status to the world (expensive watches, ties, suits).
If I am not conventionally attractive, the disadvantages are small and easy to ignore.
Not if you are short and skinny. Employment opportunities decline, so do dating opportunities (I wouldn't consider that to be "easy to ignore").
I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called "crime" and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called "domestic violence" or "acquaintance rape", and is seen as a special interest issue.)
This one is so detached from any observable reality that you can lose brain cells just reading it. Crime that happens to men is not seen as a special social concern (domestic violence and rape are both called crimes, if not some of the worst crimes one can do to another - "rape is so vile that only murder is worse". If they are listed out as separate issues, that is because they are viewed as separate, more concerning crimes which we should pay more attention to), or at least not because it happens to men (the crime which is gendered against men is homicide, 77-80% male, so it might sometimes make sense to prioritise it, say, over intimate partner violence which is also 40-50% male, check out the NISVS). However, violence against men is not seen as a "special concern" - violence against women by men is seen as a special concern. You will rarely see campaigns saying "end violence against men", "teach women not to be violent", but almost all of such gendered campaigns are gendered to favour women. Domestic violence and the rape of women are put at the front of political discourse to the point where universities deny male students their due process rights when they are accused of rape. Women are systemically favoured in both police intervention and services for victims of domestic abuse. The overwhelming majority of services are for women and the overwhelming majority of batterer programs are for men, that is in spite of the consensus in family violence research being that women commit intimate partner violence equally, if not more (once you account for unilateral violence which is mostly done by women and lesbian on lesbian violence which tops heterosexual violence and gay male violence). In some other countries like India or Spain, male victims have even fewer legal protections from partner abuse which in Spain is labelled "gendered violence (the blog is in Spanish so use a translator to understand it if you are not Spanish) ". The idea male victimisation is a "special concern" and that's a privilege is laughable and not in touch with reality. In reality, violence against men is and has been minimised, dismissed or excused, especially when it takes the form of genital mutilation where boys are mutilated in the states, their foreskins are sold for profit and they have no explicit protections from the practice meanwhile FGM is seen as a separate, special kind of violence in 39 states. Men wanting more services when they have less even though they should have more are called misogynists who are stealing resources from women and researchers or activists who discover or say that DV is symmetrical are blacklisted (e.g, Straus, Pizzey, Silverman who ended up killing himself after he opened up the FIRST male only shelter in Canada and was bullied to death by the government which denied him assistance as "male victimisation is not sufficient enough to warrant the amount of protection and funding he needed", see this as well. The overwhelming majority of moral and psychological experiments also show violence against women is viewed as a more despicable and morally reprehensible phenomenon than violence against men (see here). So, yes, men are called "selfish" even though they are less protected from violence both legally and culturally. Who isn't? Those who demand more and more protection for women even at the expense of men and then call that male privilege when male victims are treated like second-class citizens not worthy of equal protection to assist them in times of need.
My ability to make important decisions and my capability in general will never be questioned depending on what time of the month it is.
My inability to take risks, be competent, make life or death decisions and be emotionally stable will be challenged more than a woman's regardless of what time of the month it is.
The decision to hire me will never be based on assumptions about whether or not I might choose to have a family sometime soon.
The capacity of a man to provide for his wife and children or his future family can be taken into account in some hiring practices.
Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and children should be subservient to me.
Feminists and their cherry-picking abilities. "Husbands love your wives the way Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her (King James Bible)", "Husbands should love their wives the way Christ loved the church and gave his life for it" (Contemporary English version). Source . Yes, the Bible and other religions alike did tell women to be submissive to their husbands, but they also expected mutual and similar obligations of husbands. (the Bible being one example). Also, the term "the head of the household" is another word for a wage slave - as being the head of the household entails having to be fully financially liable for the support of your family. In some countries like Japan, women and men often take on traditional gender roles, but the wife usually controls most of the budget while her husband is left with pocket money in spite of working more .
If I have children with a wife or girlfriend, chances are she'll do most of the childrearing, and in particular the most dirty, repetitive and unrewarding parts of childrearing.
Historically and presently men were and are pushed away from childrearing (in marriage and post-marriage due to custody problems). Women, on the other hand, are given a flexible option and the source shows the overwhelming majority of women choose and prefer flexibility to work life, so they end up doing more childcare and housework. In many countries, men struggle to get access to paternity leave and can't take on the caregiver role which is traditionally associated with women because they are expected to work. Feminists, as per usual, only give us half of the story which in fact shows women have more flexibility than men.
Magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with imagines of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such imagines of men exist, but are much rarer.
Of course that also ignores how often men are depicted as deadbeats, irresponsible, clumsy, easily controlled, macho, incapable of being a decent parent, etc... by many TV shows and commercials alike or how often the media plays the sexual assault of men especially in prison and the sexual assault of men by women for laughs . This is a follow up video .
"But oh, well, we will only show you how attractive women are displayed on billboards to get men's dicks hard so companies can profit."
If I am heterosexual, it's incredibly unlikely that I'll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover.
Wrong, wrong. Just so wrong. - This study found women inflict severe violence on their partners more than men and men are more likely to sustain severe abuse. - This study found women are more likely to inflict severe violence on their partners than men are and men are more likely to sustain violent abuse. However, women reported being beaten up more (2.4% of women compared to 1.4% of men) than their male counterparts - men were much more likely to be kicked/bitten/hit with fists or an object and threatened with a knife/gun. They were also just as likely to experience the use of a knife/gun. - The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that over 40% of victims of severe psychological and physical violence which includes being punched, kicked, etc... are men. - These studies and reviews (here and here) find no evidence that women abuse in retaliation or self-defense or that women are less likely to strike the first blow/more likely to exercise violence in self-defense than men are. In fact, this survey found 70% of one-sided abuse is committed by women and the majority of intimate partner violence is bilateral (committed by both partners) with women hitting first more often. This blog post responds to feminist claims on domestic abuse and criticism of the CTS scale. The claim that men are rarely abused by their partners and women are innocent victims who rarely commit intimate partner violence (just like the claim that men outside of prison are rarely raped and men are not discriminated against in hiring) comes from gender stereotypes which put women in a vulnerable position to men and such gender stereotypes are inherently advantageous to women as they lead to female victims of violence being believed and or taken seriously more often than male victims.
On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men.
That darling oppression - being interrupted or letting others interrupt you due to your agreeableness and incapability of displaying dominance or assertiveness. Poor women. Here's an actual undeserved privilege: as a woman, your opinions will be rarely dismissed and called "womansplaining" purely because you are a woman. As a woman, you won't be accused of "womanterrupting" when you interrupt another woman or man while men will be accused of both, sometimes on TV or in official settings .
As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hand just as often.
This "male privilege" is addressed in the book The War Against Boys . Even if what was said is true, it's not necessarily evidence of actual discriminaton against girls as it could be caused by a multitude of factors including the fact that girls outperform boys, are the majority of A students, get better grades on average, are more likely to attend higher education and are less likely to be subjected to punishment for their behavior, so naturally when a boy raises his hand, teachers might be inclined to pick him instead because he rarely gets the chance to talk or show his skills. The idea of "male privilege" in the classroom is laughable, almost as laughable as saying violence against women is taken less seriously than violence against men (which is what you did not so long ago) once one looks at the stats on who is getting the upper hand and overacheiving. Before somebody stops me and says "but that outcome is a consequence of girls working harder than boys", well no, it isn't. Boys and girls actually get identical grades, if not boys outperform girls on subjects traditionally associated with masculinity such as mathematics and science, but are systemically downgraded on teacher assessments which causes them to underperform and be discouraged from competing alongside girls. Teacher bias is a strong predictor for the disparities in achievement between the sexes (here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). 92% of sex-selective scholarships are reserved for women, too and the system sides with female complaints of discrimination more than it does with male complaints in almost every sector - from grading discrimination to the denial of due process rights to accused men. Some schools admit to gender bias such as this one . Additionally, this study which analysed economic spending on children's education by parents from 1972 to 2007 found that parents spend more on girls' education than boys' education and this article explores the relationship between gender stereotypes and the suppression of boy behavior which is deemed to be aggressive in schools. Could disruptive behavior explain part of the disparity in achievement? Yes, but it doesn't dispute the existence of bias either. It is rather simplistic to look at disruptive behavior as "boys doing it to themselves" when such behavior can be caused by factors which are outside of boys' control such as family breakdowns as well as single parenthood and the lack of a father figure at home which might impact boys differently than girls. This 2008 report from HRW also found that in places where corporal punishment is still practiced or was practiced, boys were subject to punishment disproportionately to girls and while it would be irrational to attribute all of the disparity to bias, it would be no surprise if bias played a role in it. The article notes: "One high school teacher suggested one possible reason for the gender disparity in paddling, noting that at her school it was common practice to “stay away from hitting the girls. I guess they’re more fragile, and a lot of them could be pregnant and we wouldn’t know it.” A father of two boys and a girl felt that it was more acceptable for boys to be paddled than girls. He explained, “My little girl—don’t you put your hands on her…. As far as my boys, I am super hard on them. For one, they are young black men and they are faced with different obstacles in life. I get on them every day, and I know they say, ‘Man, my dad is tough." Many interviewees reported that boys were beaten more harshly than girls. A middle school boy in Mississippi observed that one of his teachers “paddle the boys real hard and when he paddled the girls he don’t really hit them.” One student reported that there are smaller paddles for girls: “They use a short one for girls and a long one for the boys."
I have the privilege of not being aware of my male privilege.
Women have the privilege of lying, giving society one-sided narratives, half truths and still being believed. Men do not have such a privilege ;).
submitted by Nicksvibes to MensRights [link] [comments]

The story of Travis Kalanick and how he started and built Uber into a multi billionaire company

https://youtu.be/_O-YtayUoiw
Travis Kalanick Is an american businessman who built some of the most recognizable tech startups in the world. He built Scour, Red Swoosh and Uber and after leaving uber he started cloudkitchens. He was born in 1976 and grew up in Northridge, a suburb of Los Angeles. His parents had catholic and jewish background. He showed lots of interest towards computing when he was already vey young. He learned coding when he was just in middle school and, as a matter of fact, studied computer engineering at UCLA. While at UCLA, he helped develop Scour, a company that had a search engine but was mainly known for its peer to peer file sharing service. He dropped out in order to take part in this project. That was a tough time for him because while working at Scour he lived with the disoccupation subsidies. But they received a $250 billion copyright infringement lawsuit so they declared bankruptcy. He later started another venture called Red Swoosh which was another peer to peer file sharing company. Since he was seriously broke, he moved to India while developing Red Swoosh in order to cut his expenses. Red Swoosh finally was acquire by Akamai Technologies in 2007 for $19 million dollars. This made Travis a millionaire. In 2009 after a bad experience with a taxi cab Kalanick and his friend Garrett Carp, that I’ll later cover, got the idea to create a cheaper way to find rides. Camp worked at the first prototype while Kalanick was a project supervisor. It was orginally called UberCab but later they changed the name into Uber. In 2010 Kalanick took the role of CEO at Uber. Kalanick started the service in San Francisco but later expanded in all of the United States and later to rest of the world. It was started for high end customers. It started with black cars only but when Lyft started its peer to peer ride app, Kalanick wanted a slice of the pie and raised hundreds of millions of dollars through venture and private equity funds like Google Ventures, now GV and Texas Pacific Group, also known as TPG. They used the money to create Uber X and take a chunk of the marketplace from Lyft. Uber tried to expand in different mobility sectors, started experimenting bike sharing, autonomous driving vehicles, boat rides and even helicopter rides. In 2014 they started Uber Eats, a food delivery service that is having a strong growth all around the globe. Uber started facing criticism because it became a very strong competitor to usual taxi cabs. It had privacy issues as well because the app continued to track people location even after the app was closed. It also faced criticism for not paying drivers enough. It was also accused by Google of stealing the self-driving technology. The company has also been charged for misleading drivers on possible earnings. Uber and Kalanick himself faced lots of criticism after an employee who left Uber accused the company of systemic sexual misconduct. Kalanick later, due to this, said he would step down as CEO at UBER and Dara Khosrowshahi was named as his successor. But Kalanick stayed on the board until the end of 2019, when he sold 90% of the shares he owned in the company. The company was listed on the NYSE in May, 2019. It struggled but it’s still thriving thanks also thanks to the backing of SoftBank, the fund created by Masayoshi Son, which I’ll soon cover so make sure to subscribe. But Kalanick already saw a big trend cominc, delivery food so he invested through his company City Storage Systems into UK company FoodStars, a dark kitchen company. A company that owns kitchens without restaurants. It only works with delivery. In the meantime Kalanick started a new company, CloudKitchens, also thanks to a $400 million investment received for Saudi Arabia Sovreign Fund and $300 million of his own money, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. He spends most of his time between Los Angeles and New York. He bought $36 million apartment in SoHo New York. He also started his own venture fund called 10-100 that is focused on investing in e-commerce companies in the US, China and India. He has not showed much interest in philanthropy yet but he has donated through the companies he managed.
submitted by albnasc to EntrepreneurRideAlong [link] [comments]

Updated list of Global Beermoney opportunities (+180!) - December 2020

Updated list of Global Beermoney opportunities (+180!) - December 2020

Introduction

The lists consist of opportunities that are available in at least one country that is not the US. This means there are sites which only work in Canada or the UK. There’s sites which are open to the whole world, but this does not mean everyone can really earn something on it. It’s all still very demographic and therefore location dependent. This list should give you a starting point to try out and find what works for you. I’m not using everything myself as I prefer to focus on a few, so not all are tested by me. They are found in this sub, other subreddits and other resources where people claim to have success.
I’ve chosen the format of a simple table with the bare minimum of information to keep things clean. It includes a link, how you earn, personal payment proof if available and sign-up bonus codes if applicable. Some of these bonuses are also one-time use codes specifically made for this sub! For the ones I don’t have payment proof (yet) feel free to provide some as a comment or via modmail so others know it’s legit. I am working on detailed instructions for each method that I personally use which will include things like cashout minimum, cashout options, tips & tricks,... For now I’ve split things up based on the type of earning like passive or mobile. Because of this there’s sometimes an overlap as some are both passive and on mobile or both earning crypto and a GPT (Get Paid To) website.
The lists are obviously not complete so I invite you to keep posting new ones in the sub, as a comment to this post, or in modmail. Especially if you have sites or apps which work for one single specific country I can start building a list, just like I did for The Netherlands and Belgium. If you recognize things which are in fact scams or not worth it let me know as well.

Beermoney opportunities

Get Paid To (Surveys, tasks, offers, videos, clicking links, play games, searching)

Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
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Passive (desktop & mobile)

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Crypto (faucets, mining, GPT)

Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
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AdBTC Click ads, active window surfing, autosurfing Pending /
Faucetpay Faucet Wallet, exchange, offers, tasks, trading Pending /
Faucet Crypto Faucet, ads clicking, offers, shortlinks Pending /
More Money Faucet, ads clicking, offers, shortlinks Pending /
BTCSurveys Surveys Pending /
Quicrypto Surveys, tasks, offers, games, videos Pending /
Coinpot - closed down - click for alternatives Faucet Bitcoin /
BitShark Faucet, games Pending /
Publish0x Read & write articles Pending /
Starbits Faucet (need FaucetPay account) Pending /
Coinpayu Ads clicking, videos, offers Pending /
Coinbase Crypto sign-up bonuses Bank transfer See links in thread
LBRY.tv Watch videos Pending /
Pi Network Crypto mining Pending (see here) To join you need a referral link
EarnCrypto Data entry, surveys, offers, tasks, videos, games, apps Pending /
Phoneum Games, mining Pending /

Mobile

Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
Cointiply Faucet, surveys, tasks, offers, videos Bitcoin Enter code 'beermoneyglobal'
HoneyGain Desktop & mobile phone bandwith sharing (wifi + data) Paypal $5.00 if register here
Google Opinion Rewards Surveys Play Store credit /
FreeBitcoin Faucet, lottery, betting, passive interest Bitcoin /
AppKarma Games, quizes, surveys Pending Enter code 'Proim' for 300 points when signing up
CashKarma Surveys, offers, games Pending Enter code 'Proim' for 300 points when signing up
Cash Alarm Games Pending Receive 25% of my earnings if register here
Cash Magnet Games, offers, tasks, videos Pending /
AttaPoll Surveys Pending PayPal
ClipClaps Videos, games, raffles PayPall $1.00 & Diamond Chest if register here
Quicrypto Surveys, tasks, offers, games, videos Pending /
Poll Pay Surveys PayPal $0.30 if using code '4CS6L4SQ8D' when signing up
BuzzBreak Read news, videos, offers, surveys Pending Enter code 'B06472489' when signing up
Userlytics Software testing Pending /
WowApp Games, offers, surveys, videos, chat, phone unlock, calling, cashback, shopping cashback, browsing, news reading Pending /
CuriousCat Surveys Pending /
Quickthoughts Surveys Giftcards /
Fitplay Games Pending $0.33 if register here
TV-Two Make Money Apps, games, Youtube, browsing Pending 555 credits if register here
Mistplay Games Pending /
FeaturePoints Suveys, offers, apps, cashback PayPal 50 points if register here
Money SMS Receive SMS Pending /
BIGtoken Suveys, location sharing, social media account Pending Use code 'GMGALLOIA'
McMoney Receive SMS Pending $0.22 if using code '60LGG3PR'
Pi Network Crypto mining Pending (see here) To join you need a referral link
Roamler Mystery shopping PayPal /
SMS Profit Net Receive SMS PayPal /
Streetbees Surveys, tasks, create videos, take pictures Pending Enter code '6115GF' when signing up
Simcash Send SMS [risky] Pending /
VoxPopMe Video feedback Pending /
Cash4sms Send [risky] & receive SMS Pending /
Citizen Me Surveys Pending /
ControlMySMS Receive SMS Pending /
Birdchain Send SMS [risky] Pending /
Sweatcoin Walking Pending /
COIN Explore Pending 1000 coins if register here
Panel App Surveys, location sharing Pending /
GiftHunterClub Surveys, offers, videos, apps, games Pending $0.75 if register here
Phoneum Games, mining Pending /

Research

Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
Respondent Interviews, research, surveys Pending /
Prolific Surveys, research Paypal /

User testing

Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
TestingTime Software testing Paypal /
uTest Software testing Pending /
PingPong Software testing Pending /
TryMyUI Software/UI testing Pending /
Testbirds Software/UI testing Pending /
Pulselabs Voice app testing Pending /
PlaytestCloud Game testing Pending /
Userlytics Software testing Pending /

Investing (revenue share)

Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
PaidVerts Ad clicking, offers, revenue sharing Bitcoin /
MyTrafficValue Games, investing PayPal /

Selling (designs on merchandise, skills/gigs)

Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
Fiverr Sell your skills Pending 20% off on first purchase if register here
Redbubble Sell your designs Pending /
Zeerk Sell your skills Pending /
TeePublic Sell your designs Pending /
Teespring Sell your designs Pending /

Transcribing/Translating

Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
Rev Transcribing, captioning, foreign subtitles Pending /
Gotranscript Transcribing, translating captioning, foreign subtitles Pending /
TranscribeMe Transcribing, translating, data annotation Pending /
Unbabel Translating Pending /

Others

Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
Wealthy Affiliate Learn affiliate marketing Pending /
Brave Brows internet Pending /
Andromo Develop apps Pending /

Belgium specific

Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
Buffl Surveys Gift cards /

The Netherlands specific

For The Netherlands there are a few very good options next to a bunch of ‘spaarprogramma’s. These ‘spaarprogramma’s are all the same where you receive and click a bunch of e-mails, advertisements, banners,... I advise you to create a separate e-mail address or use a good filter in your inbox as you will be spammed to death. I believe they can be a nice piece of beermoney but they take quite the effort.
Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
Euroclix Surveys, shopping & cashback, offers, energy/internet providers Bank transfer €1.95 if register here
StemPunt Surveys Gift cards 500 points if register here
Cashback XL Shopping cashback, health insurance discount Bank transfer /
Scoupy Shopping cashback, free products Pending /
Cashback Korting Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €7.50 if register here
Lady Cashback Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €7.50 if register here
Enqueteclub Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €7.50 if register here
Snel Verdienen Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €2.50 if register here
Spaar Actief Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Klik Je Zakgeld Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Zinngeld Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €0.10 if register here
My Clics Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.25 if register here
Direct Verdiend Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €2.00 if register here
Spaar4Cash Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.50 if register here
Qassa Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending /
My Flavours Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Cash Ze Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Geld Race Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.25 if register here
iPay Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.25 if register here
Double Points Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €2.00 if register here
Mailbeurs Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.50 if register here
Qlics Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.25 if register here
Centmail Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.50 if register here
Extra Euro Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.25 if register here
Gekken Goud Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Dutch Euro Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.50 if register here
Nu Cash Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register
Snel Euro Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Cash Hier Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.50 if register here
Betaalde Mails Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €2.00 if register here
Goudmails Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Online Cashen Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Crazy Mails Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Cash Paradijs Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Smart Clix Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €5.00 if register here
24/7 Discount Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending /
Beetje Zakgeld Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.25 if register here
Geldmolen Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.75 if register here
Online Zakcentje Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.50 if register here
Geldcircus Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €0.75 if register here
Lady Clix Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €0.99 if register here
Geldwolf Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here
Zilvervloot Read mails, click banners, shopping cashback, shopping deals, compare (GWL, data, internet, tv, insurances), offers, surveys Pending €1.00 if register here

Sign-up bonuses

The one-time sign-up bonus programs are still to be found here. If you find a new one let me know so I can create the post to keep all the ref links together.

Saving money

Although it’s not really about making money online, it’s still nice to save some money as well when shopping online.
Register here How to earn Payment proof Sign-up bonus code
Honey Discounts & Cashback / 500 Honey Gold if register here
G2A Game keys / /
Kinguin Game keys / /
Allkeyshop Game keys / /
AliExpress Save on online shopping / $24 coupons if register here
Gearbest Save on online shopping / /

Other subs & resources

submitted by Proim to beermoneyglobal [link] [comments]

mobile apps to earn money in india video

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mobile apps to earn money in india

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