Online fraudsters duped unwitting Serbians into handing over their cash for the chance of even bigger payouts just for ‘liking’ videos on YouTube. Many victims lost their savings, but the authorities have been slow to pursue the perpetrators.
For one Serbian woman, it began early last year with a WhatsApp message in Serbian that read: “Hello. I’m an HR manager at Tagger Media Inc. I want to offer you a part-time job that will help you earn extra income as a YouTube promoter. Are you interested?”
The woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, answered the message and was directed to a Telegram group.
The job looked a cinch: ‘like’ a bunch of YouTube videos, submit a screenshot each time and get paid 100 dinars, or roughly 80 euro cents, per ‘like’.
But that was only the start. What followed were three subsequent so-called ‘VIP’ levels in which the rewards got higher and higher, providing the participant paid an entry sum running into hundreds of euros in order to reach the next level.
The tasks grew more and more demanding and the entry sums bigger and bigger.
“If a participant can’t afford these payments, the ‘company’ offers loans but the participant does not receive their previous payments until the loan is repaid,” the woman told. “This is where the scam happens – the participant pays large amounts, but eventually cannot keep up with payments or repay the ‘loan’.”
Her debts mounting, the woman crashed out at VIP level 3, losing a considerable sum of money. She didn’t want to specify how much.
In March last year, the woman filed a criminal complaint and eight months later was called to give a statement to police.
There has been no indication since that police or prosecutors are investigating, despite at least 33 other complaints sent to Serbia’s electronic communications and postal regulator, CERT, and citing the company name ‘Tagger Media’.
“There are definitely more victims, but I don’t know any of them nor do I know if anyone has done anything about it,” the woman said. An ‘influencer marketing and social intelligence’ platform based in Santa Monica, Tagger Media was bought by Chicago-based social media management software provider Sprout Social in August 2023. Sprout Social denied being behind the scam, saying that the Tagger name had been used fraudulently in “fake hiring schemes” and that Sprout Social had terminated the Tagger brand.
The fraudsters behind such schemes are notoriously hard to trace; the individual losses are often relatively small, while multiple jurisdictions make investigating complicated. Experts say that, in the absence of a state response, only greater digital awareness can protect the public. “Statistically speaking, the largest number of frauds and cyber attacks happen by abusing the social moment, through social engineering – scams where people’s ignorance is abused,” said Jovan Bogicevic, a cybersecurity expert at the professional services network EY, previously known as Ernst & Young.
“Almost everyone puts more effort into protecting the technology, but in the end the most frequent frauds happen due to the ignorance of the end user who is being cheated.”
‘Too good to be true’
The scam went so far as to use documents featuring variations of the Tagger brand – Tagger Media, Tagger Influencer Marketing Platform & Software and Tagger Marketing Inc. Participants even received a document purportedly ‘signed’ by Peter Kennedy, founder and, until December 2023, president of Tagger Media. Contacted by BIRN, Kennedy said Tagger ceased to exist as an independent company in August 2023.
“The document is fake,” he said. “That is not my signature, and it is not a legitimate corporate document.”
Kennedy said he had not previously been aware of the scam. “If my name and signature were used fraudulently, that is identity theft,” he said, adding that he would fully support any legal action “to stop these perpetrators”. The participants in the scam were directed to the Telegram group Tagger Group Channel, which is now marked ‘FRAUD’.
At one point, however, the group hosted almost 8,000 members, according to the victim BIRN spoke to. Some of them quickly cottoned on.
“Be careful with apps and offers that sound too good to be true,” one Facebook user posted in April 2024, saying he had reported the scammers to WhatsApp and Telegram. “They pull you into groups on Telegram, so there are additional offers, and above all urgency,” the user wrote.
Andjela Rosic said she had almost been stung before, writing on LinkedIn: “Having a situation like this behind me when I almost got caught out of a desperate desire to get a job, I was able to recognise the red flags screaming in this message at first, but I certainly want to warn others who may get caught for the same or any reason.”