Showing a Craigslist scammer who's boss using Python

Some silly Craigslist scammer thinks he's gonna pull a fast one on me? I don't think so. Time to waste his time and for you to learn something with this new Python video.
Hope you enjoyed the video!
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Sincerely,
Engineer Man

[@donwilson]

You know you're on a programming video when the comments are full of "a better way to do this would be to..."

[@kevinmuller3425]

@@erikpowa lol there are still people saying python is not real Programming? Damn

[@deathcoder]

crowdrefactoring

[@blair3549]

Yes, because this is a really ineffective and futile attempt to waste the time of phishers. Skiddies gave him their ad revenue, though.

[@RayTC]

guize i totally made a minecraft fortntie mod so im obviously a master progremmer and i know what a script is so im leet haxxor

[@unknownobserver4675]

DIOhydrogen Monoxide is this bait?Whatever,I only know a bit of HTML :/

[@Aighthandle]

The great thing about this white hat kind of project is there’s always more work to be done. Great for intermediate beginners that like trolling as a force for good

[@tiptopanteater7713]

wasting peoples time is where trolling started. simple, effective and literally never gets old.

[@drew9017]

More of a red hat lol

[@terminatorfishstudios]

Red hat hacking, good guys but taking an illegal and destructive approach.

[@ryanolsen294]

@@terminatorfishstudios lol

[@wheezybackports6444]

@@terminatorfishstudios legality != morals

[@toolbelt]

That was a delight to watch. I’m learning Python and I find this so inspiring.

[@moreish7193]

me too :)

[@lennyshoe]

Same here!

[@oppenguin6462]

same

[@connormclean4220]

Yea things like this are brilliant for learners because it makes them actually want to learn more and try this out . This is a great little project and videos like this is literally how I got into coding and actually started coding in my free time

[@roguishowl3915]

Me three ✌🏻

[@CecilMerrell]

To make it harder for him to sort through the list, you should just random select from the list of top 10k commonly used passwords instead of auto generating them.

[@hereandnow3156]

Isn't it also likely the scammer would be able to reasonably discard the fake data he sent by looking at the time and the IP address they are coming from?

[@yousif6982]

@@hereandnow3156 yeah he definitely shouldve used a vpn and something like the rockyou password list to be safer and more effective, still a good idea though

[@JohhnyBasedDepartmentDab]

@@hereandnow3156 That is what i was also wondering

[@peterhindes56]

​@@hereandnow3156only if he logs the IP with the username and password otherwise he's going to have to comb through access logs that he may or may not have

[@bonbonbonbons]

​@@hereandnow3156Use proxying

[@dislikebutton966]

Imagine if you had one of those emails and were wondering how scammers gets your email 😂

[@2oqh]

These aren’t unrealistic at all so guaranteed atleast a few of them are real 😂😂

[@thatonehenward4275]

the password though.

[@MintBunHunter]

Nathan9

[@tylermorris84]

I think this is my new favorite channel... My apartment complex made us register times to use facilities during Covid. They released the availability to register for gym/spa/exercise room EXACTLY 7 days in advance, and they all got booked immediately through the UI- it was very competitive. So, I back-engineered the site and wrote a python script to sign up for whatever future gym times I wanted. It never failed. I love to see other quality abuses of python!

[@slydog784]

You need to run this as a service across multiple IPs over several days/weeks so he can’t easily delete your responses.

[@cardinal9009]

I bet that website is one of hundreds he uses unfortunately

[@mrjpz]

@@cardinal9009 never ever have i seen someone else use this for a pfp. I cropped my pic up more though

[@cardinal9009]

@@mrjpz first time I've seen someone like that as well. one more word and I'll crop my pic up more too.

[@mrjpz]

@@cardinal9009 kzbin.infoUgkxIq_FBPgezSOpIPVl0WiQd0mrzAFjGsik if you watch this clip you can see we're multiplying

[@Mmmkay..]

awww look guys twins 😊

[@midnari]

I've been learning C for the last two months and I'm so damn happy that I can understand what you're doing. I doubt I could implement it right now, but just understanding it is so cool to me.

[@zaftmonkeynuts5052]

Yeah, one thing I’ve learned from programming is understanding the code and actually implementing it to something are totally different.

[@midnari]

@@zaftmonkeynuts5052 That's the point of studying, isn't it? Learning, enjoying, practicing the code. Yeah, I can't use Python, but I'm learning the foundation necessary to pick it up in the future. I can craft little things in "C" at the moment, and yeah... It's a different syntax, but the same fundamental rules apply. The joy is that - two months ago- I couldn't even program a "Hello World" script. I can now. Shoot, I've made some extremely awesome things that would take YOU two seconds to do. Even then, Good Lord, I see the vast difference between me in December and me now. Feels good, man.

[@Solaceon]

I feel this completely! I have to understand something and set an objective in mind in order to learn it. As a little kid, those connections were formed by Neopets. I picked up a really impressive amount of HTML and CSS for a 6-8 year old. I was aiming to learn Python next, but alas life had other plans. I had a passion, but as I got older nothing helped make things "click". I lost that passion for years. But then KZbin started recommending me these more advanced "taking down scammers" videos and for the first time in forever I'm forming these connections and I'm absorbing it all like a sponge. I'm so freaking excited! The other day I made a simple little thing in Python that responds to birthday posts on Facebook with a "thank you" so I didn't have to do it myself. Such an easy little project but I did it myself and it feels so damn good!!

[@TrueComboKing]

@@midnari I agree, it’s literally the same feeling as listening to someone bad mouth you in a foreign language and you coming eight back at them and speaking that same language. It just feels good. By all regards, coding in all its forms, is a new language and the feeling you get from understanding it and learning to implement it is the best feeling in the world.

[@tcg1_qc]

I understand most of it but I don't really know Python so I was a bit confused at some of the things he did, like the .join(random + for loop). How does that work? You can just put a loop inside a function parameter and it will make the function execute every time it loops? Or does it make the random function execute 8 times and add the characters together?

[@asapbembyy4614]

Maybe a better idea is to try to make passwords seem legit, also adding random names or literally the whole dictionary, cuz not everyone makes their passwords in symbols, but instead words or phrases, so if he just scrolls through the yahoo and passwords lists and find a combination that seems unique, he will know which one is the real one and which one is not.

[@4esv]

@badrobots statistics, like how 2/3 of doctors are male or how 3/4 of all software engineers are men

[@jar3040]

@badrobots tmw genz

[@martinchki]

or he can just delete all of the emails and passwords starting from -email- and as password, -password-. The 2 ints he used to see where emails and passwords go.

[@Ramsesian]

@badrobots yikes

[@Shezza_1212]

@badrobots Cool, but who cares

[@rich1051414]

You should randomize the length of the password, and randomize the domain of the email. As it is, all he has to do is filter out all yahoo domains with a password length of 8, and he would have minimal loss of acquired real passwords.

[@wujeonghyun6865]

exactly

[@ikyyntts7807]

yeah thought his generation algo was a bit dodgy, no last names, no full stops or underscores etc, just one name, one letter, same domain, all random 8 char passwords

[@deildegast]

there is always room for improvement, but to show how easy you can overload a spammer with a short python program really opened my eyes on what you(anyone really) can do.

[@goharjoa]

Excellent. Excellent. If I had your skills, I'd do the same to these scammers and con artists. Keep up the good work.

[@ohtug]

con artist gives them too much credit lol

[@jacobhinger5039]

He shows us the code and how to implement it yourself.

[@2oqh]

@@jacobhinger5039 only applicable to a very specific situation, he probably wants to know how to do it for a more diverse list of scams, etc

[@Mrkonc]

You know, even almost 5 years later I still use this video and what it taught me. Thanks Engineer Man!

[@amethystjean1744]

This is awesome. Thank you for doing this. I also love seeing inside python as I don't know how to do that but it makes it seem like something that would be cool to learn more about.

[@dheibeljr]

No time like the present to learn! Python isn't that hard and there are TONS of resources and the learning curve has been made so shallow, you could totally teach yourself if you wanted to. You got this!

[@joalltaeuber8065]

Great Video. Just found it 4 years later. Clearly, it's a timeless one. Thanks.

[@IFGchannel931]

Nice! To make it even better, the e-mail domains could be randomized, passwords could be less random (there are too many special characters in them), maybe some longer then others, and you could space out the rate in which the info is sent.

[@rottsrool]

Love what you do, thanks from all us non tech savvy people 👍

[@theentirestateofalaska.4983]

Non programmers you mean.

[@manda_o_pix]

The scammer seeing a bunch of emails getting logged in just 2 minutes: interesting

[@TrueComboKing]

been binging videos like this lately. Super enjoy the fact that you guys use this knowledge to fk with scammers immensely. I think I’m going to try my hand at learning how to do stuff like this. When I was in middle school I practiced coding with Java but stopped after a month or two, now is the time. xD

[@robertgoss4842]

You're amazing. You are doing noble work. Just glad you're on the side of goodness and light.

[@MegaDonaldification]

This is by far the best way to teach others how to learn how to think or learn. Excellent work

[@G0ingN0va]

I've only just come across your channel and I'm amazed at how swiftly you deal with scammers. Have you ever considered teaming up with Jim Browning or, Scambaiter et al? If any of you guys combined you'd destroy scammers globally in a matter of minutes! Great channel. Subscribed!

[@TrueComboKing]

I’d love to see them do more than ruin a scammers day. Those scammers in India are the absolute sickest people I’ve ever heard speak. The second they don’t get their way, they start cursing the other party out and….idk why but they always like to add insults about the other parties mom, lol. These guys are insanely good at what they do. I’d love it if they took it one step further and messed with the temperature control settings in one of those “call centers”. I don’t know if that’s possible though, they probably don’t have a smart thermostat to hack. It would be funny though to turn their heater up to the highest setting and watching them squirm as they try to turn it down, lol

[@alexsemine1]

Awesome! I don't know anything about python but the way you explain things is awesome and super entertaining. Love your stuff. Cheers

[@Draghful]

I'm gonna be totally honest here... These videos are the most satisfying thing I've seen in the past 3 years. :)

[@StephenBeale]

Good to see you still manually copy/paste and edit the names list :D I was expecting some automation I didn't know about.

[@mxbishop]

Bravo. This video is like the "feel good" stories one finds every month in American Rifleman magazine.

[@justjosh1400]

Great video idea. I think a more efficient approach would be to send it over time. Because what he's going to do as a scammer is see everything that came in at a start time and end time notice that he got 10000 or so while phishing. Most likely he will just delete all the data that came in during a certain time frame.

[@johnavernia1026]

I'm a beginner, I know nothing about programmer until several months ago when I started doing CS courses for fun. And man, I'm so happy that I could actually understand about 70% what he was doing in this video. After more courses and finishing more fun programming projects, hopefully, my understanding would've reach 100%. Awesome video and fuck those scammers!

[@kenkoscielski1409]

This kind of vid is great. Could watch all day. Subscribed

[@Lykon]

From the console right click on "copy as curl". After that simply go and convert curl to python request. So you can skip the basic request code part.

[@bobfromwork]

I mean sadly it's gonna be easy for him to just exclude all emails from yahoo with 8 chars of password, but it's a decent idea.

[@ZacklFair]

you can always do more or less chars in between. takes 1 change in the code. or add more randomness i suppose. but thats not for a 5 minute video i guess :>

[@rubin_k4234]

I can’t believe I’m just now seeing these videos lol. Simple yet great 👍

[@roboppi6368]

I just want you to know that thanks to you and your videos, I finally know what to study. Thank you. I was so lost but just watching you work cleared everything for me.

[@jrryan7195]

Your videos are awesome--very inspirational

[@Athandatu]

This was the nerdiest and best feeling form of trolling a scammer.

[@richlv422]

Keep making bro. You keep making I’ll keep watching 😂😂😂✌🏻

[@manorothpitlordextraordina4041]

Would have been cool to add variable lengths in the passwords / emails so that the submissions aren’t so uniform. It would be fairly trivial for him to purge the database of all email/password combinations of a certain length.

[@dead_protagonist]

right.. most people use gmail anyway

[@MotorcycleRebuilds]

he could just filter the yahoo emails out

[@markaholt]

This is f'n awesome.

[@guitarmeetsscience]

Nice! Maybe randomizing a set of emails (yahoo, gmail, aol) etc would really add to his confusion. I like it!

[@mrstardust8718]

I love people like this who use things they love to make things better

[@anuragpramanik6095]

The whole world uses vs code and it’s auto completion. This legend still uses Atom and rocks. Great video man.

[@PedroCristian]

Real programmers use butterflies...

[@polarcat0156]

@@PedroCristian real programmers write it on paper and use ocr to get the code

[@roysnider3456]

I love that your giving it back to those scumbags.

[@bradarmstrong3952]

I love the casual way he uses the scammer's setup against the scammer!

[@SimonASNG]

Scammer see's what's going on and just deletes all the data from Yahoo emails. But yea, the videos are great, keep 'em coming. If you spent a heck of a lot more time making the plan more devastating to the spammer, it would make the videos too long (perhaps unwatchable) and you'd just get fewer comments (bad for the all mighty algorithm). Good job.

[@pluto9000]

You think one day we will all be controlled by the algorithm? 😅 Maybe it made me type that. 😵‍💫

[@SimonASNG]

@@pluto9000 The algorithm just makes sure you never see any videos that don't appeal to its whims... More of a filtering out process than a control process. But yea, you are probably totally under the algorithms control at this point. ;)

[@luckydannumber2]

Easy way is to randomize the Yahoo emails to gmail, outlook and all the free ones, This would prompt him to delete all the free emails and lose all the legit ones. Its an extra two or three lines of code as it's python.

[@julesssssssss]

@@singu7arity run this all day, with random time delay between entries by 3 seconds to 2 minutes or smth

[@KennyJacobs]

Me: Stumbles on to this video Me: Heads on over to my spam folder Me: Opens the first email that looks like a phishing attempt Me: Let's the fun begin... Thanks for this awesome tutorial. I haven't laughed this hard in a long time.

[@LilYet]

ok

[@teksaucee]

not all heroes wear capes lol

[@jdavis460]

Wish I was that cleaver to write those programs would love to keep flooding the scammer’s with junk.

[@deanlawson6880]

Wow! That was impressive! Nicely done!

[@bjhtubewwd]

Keep it up. Awesome to watch

[@jesvinpalatty9112]

Hey Cool work, You could have also made an array of email domains and randomly assign it to name strings to confuse the scammer more. Coz he may simply filter the @yahoo domain guys now but with randomizing the domain the scammer will be more confused

[@youseemerage9711]

I feel like learn python simply to follow the example. Scammers are the worst and i love that you are able to fight back

[@andrewn1974]

thank you for the video! I really enjoy your videos, thanks for sharing with us!!!

[@Lykon]

That form name and url seems a random code. Are you sure the request is always the same? That may be used as a unique ID. If that's the case your code isn't doing anything, but simply overwriting with a new username and password all the time. I would have verified that those fields and url were always the same. Or, if they changed, also looped that with random shit inside my code. Field names could just be part of a "any" type data structure accepting all sort of shit. This means you can maybe even do more damage.

[@F39Productions]

ya those look like csrf tokens

[@pluto9000]

Totally

[@YISTECH]

my thoughts exactly

[@Christian-mn8dh]

hmm

[@garymyers6638]

I like your mission. Be great if one could package a retaliation kit for consumers to aim at scammers

[@johngillespie4116]

Keep it up. I feel better now you got a scammer. Thank you, John.

[@raquelocasio8588]

I love this. Someone needs to create a meetup where coders get together once a week and hit scammers like this over coffee. Great job!

[@andrentaz]

Some random Luke: "nice! I hate scams too!" Also, some random Luke seeing his email being randomly generated: "well, that explains a lot 🧐👀" Great vid though :)

[@davidcermak9822]

Thanks for being an engineer hero.

[@arnoldcaines9012]

I like your vids. They're short and to the point. I don't know any better so I'll trust that you're actually being a headache to scammers. Maybe you'll encourage other with similar skills to do the same and life will become difficult for scammers.

[@rickestabrook4987]

Justice. You are serving a good cause. Keep it up.

[@danielschwan3298]

I totally love this kind of videos ^^

[@stiljohny]

nice work man... you could have create an array for the email domain and randomly take from there , cause now he has loads of yahoo, easy pattern !! nice video!

[@longnaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame]

yeah slighlty more dedication wouldve ruined the scammers career

[@filipoda123]

Bro the comments dissapeared lol

[@Intikus]

The scammers got him back

[@filipoda123]

@@Intikus HAHHAHA BEST WHAT IVE SEEN TODAY LMFAO

[@petersmith5199]

Love it! Well done!!

[@louiseboyle9618]

Well if your IP is logged when you post your form, it will be easy for him to figure out which credential are legit or not 🙄

[@theraven.4]

In which case hopefully, he was using a VPN or proxy.

[@SensSword]

What's he doing logged in as root in terminal?

[@Davi-jt1hp]

I dream of a World where everyone has an app being fed with codes like that, running in background for just a few seconds a day.

[@kaderiddle3492]

People talking about the code and the efficiency of it and meanwhile I started a day ago and have no idea what’s going on.

[@rayyy6384]

why no comments?

[@richardhamilton2344]

because kekeke

[@artificial_photon]

He probably mass deleted it using python lol

[@TIRFemcel]

@@artificial_photon lmao thats probably actually what happened

[@rileylutz2563]

I’m imagining him laying out this process in a video now 😂 “I can’t stand commenters and I thought this would be a fun way to waste the commenters time and hopefully teach you some python😊”

[@4twentyjay]

This video made me want to learn how to code. Starting with the basics for now. This video is 🔥🔥🔥

[@reactworld2975]

That generation pattern was so obvious, that i would filter out these in seconds.. This might look impressive to the uninitiated, but to a coder this looks just lazy and pretty low-effort.

[@GamerFigure]

because thats exactly what it is. lazily written code that could be further optimized with +- 5 mins of your time.

[@tossajalumen401]

yep! Totally junior-dev stuff

[@JoinLooksmaxDotOrg]

make a better one then bro i wouldn't mind watching that

[@huntergaylor1533]

dude it took him like 5 minuets lol ofc its low effort how much did you expect with that timeframe

[@AvanaVana]

Agree, any scammer with the basic level of skill needed to set up that scam will also just instantly delete all those entries in whatever csv file that php script writes and the scammer then reads in excel (most likely)

[@lesliesavage9229]

0:48 Oh no!!! 1:51 Not the names list? :) I loved it when you did the other one with the test credit card number. Great video, and I look forward to another one. They asked for it!

[@mead650]

Catching scammers is the best way to learn Python, great job!

[@kricku]

"Wow. All these people with random passwords of the same length logged in at the same time from the same place" :P

[@TDBurrow]

I wish I was this smart, it’s all I can do to make a damn telephone call.

[@kacpergurtowski3644]

Im love that content man maybe do some series with scamming scammers 😂😂

[@Markyroson]

Very interesting and I love the idea of this. The downside though is that they could filter out ones that are 8 long and from yahoo if they caught on. Would be better to randomize the length, perhaps include some of the most common passwords as well as some complex ones, and vary the listed provider?

[@micahturpin8042]

Pretty awesome how you can do something like this so quickly and easily in Python. One of the reasons I love the language.

[@z2mighty11]

i love how short these videos are, instead of like 30 minutes.

[@gordonsneddon360]

Exelent work work man keep it up

[@PeterAllen09]

Very gratifying. Well done

[@fabianm.9551]

I got like 10 exact identical phishing mails the last 24hrs, remembered that video and did the same. Thanks for the inspiration 😁👍🏻

[@MAN-hk9wq]

I have absolutely no clue what he is talking about, but a good deed never goes unnoticed

[@brianhope4236]

It’s amazing to watch your brilliance. That’s not much of a compliment coming a complete idiot when it comes to tech, but I thought that I’d give you the compliment anyway!

[@LMike2004]

You are deadly at this! Awesome by the way....

[@caw7007]

I love what you do! Scammers infuriate me!

[@pivottech8881]

This guys too calm for me man, its so funny.

[@TornadoWhirl33]

Way to go, man! Maybe he'll think twice about pulling that stunt again lol.

[@naradaian]

A pleasure to watch your work and wry smile. Peace

[@ZackGoodger]

Literally never knew about the little trick to populate all the strings around quotes and add a comma at the end tried it in VScode and it works amazing. Thanks :D

[@bf945]

Very cool. One suggestion, mix up the domain names so the scammer has a harder time picking out which are bogus vs legit ones.

[@Oratordio]

Absolutely need more

[@best_relaxa]

this snapback really does a good job making you look more like engineer

[@videowatcher4006]

We need more guys like you to stamp out those scamming bastards

[@MrMILLYS77]

Love your stuff bro - can I ask how long it’s taken you to develop these kinds of skills and Knowledge

[@dengaz4099]

"both waste this guys time and show you something cool in python." best quote

[@mikerafone4736]

Hey Engineer, great job!

[@shmirdonkin]

Oh he's like a cyber superhero. I like that.

[@themiddleplace]

Good work brother!

[@leonardocerliani3479]

this gave me an idea for a fun DE project...;) thanks engineer man!

[@davywavy111]

Thank God!!!!your out here helping we got scammed and they're still constantly sending us links even from Verizon which pisses me off bc I love Verizon n have been a custy since 2008