For most of us, phone scammers are just annoying. Sadly, the scammers often target people who get so scared that they do what they are asked to, so the best thing to do when you realize you are talking with an imposter is to report them.
Or you could scare them back. The anchor for FOX 5 Morning and Good Day D.C. Jeannette Reyes posted a TikTok video showing how she pranked a scammer by scaring him into thinking he was live on the news.
More info: TikTok
Jeannette Reyes was sick of scam callers and decided to make things more interesting and filmed the whole interaction
Image credits: msnewslady
Jeannette Reyes is a news anchor working for the FOX 5 channel. She also doesn’t shy away from social media and has 158k followers on Instagram. On TikTok, she has an even bigger following of 854k people.
Her videos there regularly get hundreds of thousands of views and reaching a million is not so unusual either. One of her more recent videos that was viewed by 6.3 million app users showed her talking with a scammer trying to lure her into giving him $2,500.
The TikTok video capturing her prank got over 6 million views and nearly 2 million likes
Image credits: msnewslady
Jeannette started the video by saying that she is really tired of these callers and this time she would like to have some fun. So she answers the phone, puts it on speaker and films the whole interaction.
The person calling identified himself as Jason O’Neil. It’s safe to assume that the name was not his real one. Jason didn’t say what institution he was representing and immediately went to the sum of money that had to be paid. He didn’t go into further detail of the origin or this debt; granted, maybe he had a story, but Jeannette was compliant and pretended she wanted to sort it out right away.
The person who was calling wanted Jeannette to pay $2,500 for an outstanding warrant
While listening to the call, you might catch that Jason was taken aback. It could be that he didn’t expect this call to go so smoothly—after all, Jeannette didn’t ask any questions and just pretended to trust this random person on the phone.
However, the scammer quickly realized that this might be his lucky day and proceeded with his fraud. When he asked Jeannette for her card number, she saw a perfect opportunity to play her game.
As the news anchor knew she was dealing with a fraud, she wasn't planning to do that, but instead pretended their conversation was broadcast on live television
The woman started with the number 3 as if she had started dictating the card number, but then counted down to 1 as if someone was counting the time left until the live broadcast would begin.
After counting to 1, Jeannette switched to her news anchor voice and very convincingly announced that this call was part of an investigation into scam calling and that the FBI was working on this.
When Jeannette asked the person to repeat his name, she only heard the beeping signal as Jason hung up.
When Jeannette asked the person to repeat his name, she only heard the beeping signal as Jason hung up.
People loved this idea so much that they asked Jeannette to make a separate video just for the announcement with her news voice
Image credits: msnewslady
People who saw the video loved this idea of scaring the scammer by making them think that the FBI is on their case. In fact, people liked this idea so much that they started using the video for their own scam calls.
Later, Jeannette uploaded another video for the sole purpose of people being able to use her voice. She changed her greeting to ‘hello’ instead of ‘good evening’ so it could be used at any time of the day and also replaced the FBI with the police due to audience request.
You can listen to the full conversation in Jeannette's video
What do you think of Jeannette’s tactic of scamming the scammer? Have you ever seen something similar to this? How do you usually deal with scam calls? Let us know your opinions about the video and share your stories in the comments!
TikTok users were praising the news anchor for using her impressive voice to scare off the scammer
