TikTok star exposes scammers' tactics to educate followers
HOUSTON - With seven million followers on social media, Ryan Kelly is known for flipping the script on scammers. He works to show his followers how to spot scams and has even helped some victims get their money back.
"Someone just tried to scam me online, but this is my master's degree in homeland security, so let's have some fun," said Ryan Kelly in a post on TikTok.
Kelly is a comedian with a degree in Homeland Security who has amassed millions of followers on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch, where he turns the tables on scammers.
"I sent this fake FBI agent his real address," said Kelly in an Instagram post.
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"For me, it's taking what they use against us and flipping it on them. It's that social engineering tactic. And thankfully, due to my understanding of technology, I am able to clone websites," explained Kelly in an interview with FOX 26.
"Cloning a website is both easy and so much fun, so let's just pick one, say Google. So, this is a perfectly normal Google log-in. The problem is it's going through a website that I own. Then that cloned website sends all that data that you entered back to me," Kelly demonstrates in a post on Instagram.
"I send them a link just with a simple IP logger so I can have a baseline. I'm figuring out which device they're on. I'm figuring out where they're coming from," Kelly told us.
"I got their IP address. That's her ID, this is her address, this is her full name and date of birth," Kelly says in a TikTok post, as he points to information that he obscured with red ink.
He says one scammer claimed to be with the band One Direction.
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"He did end up blocking me. Funny enough, I had access to the account. I was able to unblock myself from the inside. And after that, I ended up deleting the account, so he couldn't scam other people," said Kelly.
His advice to protect yourself from scammers?
"Take yourself off of sites like White Pages and People Finder, things that might have your address and phone number," he said.
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Kelly suggests limiting the information you share on social media sites to prevent scammers from doing what's called social engineering, using that information to pretend to be someone you might know.
"And maybe don't post where you work. Honestly, LinkedIn, what I've been seeing a ton of is LinkedIn scams where people will e-mail as, 'I'm this boss' or 'I'm this CFO and I need you to pick up some, like, cards or I need to pick up this for a, you know, holiday party coming up. We'll reimburse you.' It's a scam," said Kelly.