Agent Insights Ep 33: Infiltration (and why there's a rule about it)

Hello, everyone! Flint here, posting on my Coronavirus Vacation. For today's Agent Insights, I will talk about infiltration.

Infiltration, in this sense, means non-scammers pretending to be scammers in order to get access to scam teams/hangouts. Usually, the aim of this is to get the usernames of the scammers to report,  gather evidence to make posts, prevent scams by showing up to the ones planned by the group and warning people, or gaining insight into scamming methods to more easily catch scammers in general. 

In our Code of Conduct, there is a rule which states, "If in any case you find out about a scamming team or another agent asks you to scam with them, DO NOT, under any circumstances, try to go undercover. Instead, get evidence and report to someone higher up." There are several reasons why this is a rule, many of which also apply to non-agents.

• You may get reported/posted on/banned/suspended while undercover.
• People who infiltrate and people who actually want to scam but say they infiltrated when caught are often indistinguishable.
• There's a good chance that the actual scammers will quickly realize you're infiltrating and kick you out before you can do anything. 

• Scammers often use alts/hide their usernames, even in what they think are friendly places. Getting their usernames will be harder than you think, and may result in a higher chance of being kicked out.
• In a large group, if scams keep getting interrupted whenever this one person (i.e. the infiltrator) knows about it , they will quickly realize that infiltration is happening and kick "this one person" out.
• There is little scamming information that you couldn't learn by just watching actual scammers as you come across them, or by reading our Types of Scams page and our Agent Insights posts. Scammers aren't very innovative, and most scams you come across are the same old trust-trading type scams. Maybe with little twists on them, that are still easily recognizable as scams. 
• If you get caught by the scammers, they may target you for harassment/scamming/hacking. 

And, for one-on-one things like if another agent asks you to scam with them, the first point still stands. There's also very little you could do with infiltrating that you couldn't do by reporting to higher-ups, with much less risk. 

As you can see, infiltrating is a tricky business, and should be avoided for all the aforementioned reasons. It's too much risk for too little reward. This goes doubly for SASS Agents. 

That's all for today's post. Bye!