Scambaiting as a Form of Online Video Entertainment: An Exploratory Study

Popular scambaiting content creators and streamers have turned scambaiting into a form of video entertainment, which has accumulated hundreds of millions of views on YouTube alone. In this explorative study, we followed four popular scambaiters and their viewers to gain insight into the phenomena. Four levels of scambaiting were observed: (1) wasting scammer’s time; (2) annoying scammers;(3) making fun of or ridiculing scammers; and (4) collecting assets from the scammers for authorities. While the first level could be regarded as a harmless activity, the rest require some ethical justification. To this end, scambaiters were found to gain sympathy by highlighting and showing the ruthlessness of the scammers. Scambait video viewers regularly shared experiences of their relatives being scammed. While recent work has suggested scambaiting could enhance racial stereotypes and hatred towards certain groups, such behavior could not be seen in the analyzed YouTube comments.