How Romance Scammers Port Video Files Over Skype

Hey, everybody. I've been talking a lot about online scams lately. In particular, I've been talking about romance scams, partly because many of my photos, you may know, already have been used in these romance scams. Basically, the perpetrators will take photos of people on the Internet, set up fake dating profiles, and con women into these fake romantic relationships that often end up in the victim giving quite a bit of money to some of these scammers. One of the things that I've heard from the victims is in cases where they've used my photographs is they are so convinced and that the one convincing moment that they've had is when they saw me on video via Skype. And that confused me for a while because obviously I'm not talking to these victims via Skype. So I wanted to find out exactly how I might do that if I wanted to figure out a way to actually take videos of me that you might find on the Internet and use it over Skype. So I did a little bit of searching today. A tool that I found today was something called manycam. And manycam, I'm sure it has a lot of really great purposes, instructional purposes and so on, but this is one of many tools that probably could be used very easily in scams like this. And it matches what I've heard from victims in terms of what actually happened happened. So to set up something like this, just to give you an idea, a little bit of literacy at this point about how, you know this sort of thing, this tool can be used if you first of all find a video. And there's all sorts of different videos of me online. And this particular one, that would be one that probably you could certainly see kind of a YouTube sort of a screen, webcam type, quality type video. And in this particular one, I'm actually talking right at the screen or at some unknown audience if you watch the actual video to download this video. There's a lot of tools that you can use to download videos from the Internet. So, for instance, keepvid is a very popular one. The one I use is Clip Converter. And the way that I've got that set up is actually you could do it right from the website, but I have it as a Chrome extension. So you can download videos right underneath any particular video that you're viewing on the web. So it downloads to the desktop and it's really, really easy. Now, manycam, I've got that downloaded at this point. Basically what you can do is you can pop multiple sources into manycam. So that could be multiple cameras, but also could be media clips. And I've got it set up here. Hopefully you can see this. So it looks something like this. And basically you'd have your regular cam here, but then you can click on plus and go to media files. And I've already saved that video to the desktop just to make it easier here. And basically it's right set up and queued. And if I wanted to run this, basically I would just have to pull up something like Skype or Google Hangouts or something else like that. Go to my Skype preferences. I'm using a Mac. It would be a bit different on a PC. Go to audio video, and you'll notice that you can actually change the camera. So you can actually choose many cam as your camera. So you can go back from my Logitech normal camera, the one I'm using right now, or to my ManyCam virtual cam. And all I have to do here, basically, while I'm in Skype, is set the movie source over there. And you can see very quickly the. The video. Now, it's not moving right now because I'm on in a video chat. But you can give a sense of how that might work. But it can be very convincing when you do something like this, you know, and that's kind of made me pause because, you know, you might say, well, you know, once you've seen someone on video, then obviously that's that person. But I think this is a really kind of an important lesson, I guess, that there's a lot of ways to digitally, you know, do fraud, you know, especially when it comes to these romance scams. So in particular cases, although I'm not talking in the video, what. What's been reported obviously, is sometimes they will say, well, the web, the connection isn't really good, so there might not be audio, or the video might cuddle. Very quickly you can see how that might convince some of the victims even further. So just a little bit of web literacy today, and hopefully you can actually share this with others. And just. Just so people know that this is the kind of thing that happens. And this is. Seems to be a very common thing that scammers might do to really trick you into being. Into thinking that they're someone else. So take care.