Kitboga is the Internet alias of an American Twitch streamer and YouTuber whose content primarily focuses on scam baiting against phone fraud. His channel has over one million followers on Twitch, and his YouTube channel has over three million subscribers.
Career
Scambaiting
In mid-2017, Kitboga found out that his grandmother had fallen victim to many scams designed to prey on the elderly, both online and in person. He then discovered "Lenny", a loop of vague pre-recorded messages that scam baiters play during calls to convince the scammer that there is a real person on the phone without providing any useful information to the scammer. After seeing these videos uploaded to YouTube, he decided to replicate the calls himself. While he started out streaming for his friends on Twitch, his viewership soon started growing beyond his immediate circles. In March 2020, with the growing prevalence of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kitboga started baiting scammers who were selling an essential oil which they dishonestly claimed was a cure for COVID-19, following a United States Federal Trade Commission warning alerting consumers of coronavirus-related scams. In November 2020, Kitboga was signed by talent agency UTA. In May 2022, Kitboga was signed by Ryan Morrison's Evolved Talent Agency, again to expand Kitboga's goal of anti-scam messaging. In May 2023, Kitboga partnered with Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange, to create a spoof Kraken account to trap scammers into giving wallet addresses from stolen crypto accounts, along with their personally identifiable information should they decide to sign up for an account.
Technique In his videos, Kitboga engages in scam baiting with several types of scammers. Besides technical support scammers, he also engages with refund scammers, IRS scammers, social security scammers, and others. He mixes elements of popular culture into his dialogue and wordplay into some calls; for example, in one March 2020 call against a scammer falsely claiming to sell a COVID-19 cure, Kitboga implied the scammer should be called "Saint Anne", eliding the two words to sound like "Satan". To misdirect scammers away from his real identity, as well as for viewer entertainment, Kitboga often poses as many different characters during his videos, including an elderly woman or man, a Russian man named Vicktor Viktoor, a valley girl named Nevaeh ("Heaven" spelled backward), or a competing technical support scammer named Daniel. He does this by imitating the accent or vocal intonation of the character he is trying to portray, often with a voice changer to alter the pitch of his voice. The common factor uniting Kitboga's characters is that they are not computer-savvy, giving the scammer confidence that the scam is more likely to succeed. The scams against which Kitboga engages in scambaiting often require the victim to install remote desktop software. As an example, in the case of technical support scams, the scammers request access to the victim's computer to "diagnose" a technical issue (where none exists), for which they then request payment to "fix". Because of the risks involved in remotely connecting to an unknown computer, Kitboga uses a different computer than his while scambaiting; the computer runs a virtual machine equipped with a virtual private network. This ensures not only that any malware or other software installed by the scammer does not affect his computer, but also hides his true IP address and location from the scammers. However, scammers can sometimes discern when a potential victim is using a virtual machine, so Kitboga and his team "have spent countless hours 'spoofing' [their] virtual machine to look and feel like a well-used, average computer." Types of phone scams other than the technical support scam also often involve the scammer giving some reason to connect to the victim's computer. In online refund scams, for example, the scammer requests to connect to the victim's computer to access their online banking website. When Kitboga interacts with these scammers, in addition to taking the aforementioned precautions, he also uses a fake online banking website he created specifically for use in this type of scambaiting. This website contains features that waste time for scammers, and Easter eggs for the entertainment of Kitboga's audience. When baiting IRS scammers and other types of scammers that request payments via gift card, Kitboga uses a piece of computer code to make the gift card redemption page appear to accept any gift code that follows a specified format. Then, when the scammer asks him to read out gift codes so that they can claim them, he types false codes into the page and redeems them himself, pretending not to know any better. At the end of bait calls, Kitboga sometimes turns off his voice changer and reveals that he has been aware that the call was an attempted scam the entire time. Some of the scammers immediately hang up when Kitboga reveals the ruse to them. Others' reactions range from anger to regret, with some maintaining that they are legitimate tech support agents. Still others are unrepentantly dismissive, informing him that plenty of impending victims yet await on hold. Many memes have spawned from Kitboga's videos, one of the most popular being the "Do not redeem" meme that began in August 2020 in which a cantankerous and abrasive scammer from India using the fake name "Steve Watson" spends nine hours attempting to trick Kitboga (in the role of an elderly woman named Paula) into sending him Google Play gift cards so he can resell them for profit, only for Kitboga to start pretending to redeem all the cards in front of him, while "Steve" frantically screams not to redeem the cards (the scam requires the victim to either send a picture of the code on the back of the gift card or read it out to him, and redeeming them prevents the scammer from receiving the money). The original "Do not redeem" video remains one of the most popular videos on his channel, with a view count of 23 million as of September 2025.
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