The secret world behind those scammy text messages

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You might have seen these texts before. The scam starts innocently enough. Maybe it's a "Long time no see" or "Hello" or "How are you." For investigative reporter Zeke Faux it was – "Hi David, I'm Vicky Ho. Don't you remember me?"

Many people ignore them. But Zeke responded. He wanted to get scammed. This led him on a journey halfway around the world to find out who is sending him random wrong number texts and why. After you hear this story, you'll never look at these messages the same way again.

To hear the full episode check out Search Engine's website.

Search Engine was created by P.J. Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni. This episode was produced by Garrott Graham and Noah John. It was fact-checked by Sean Merchant. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Search Engine's executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reis-Dennis.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:05.8	A couple years ago, my friend PJ Vote started getting these weird text messages on his phone.
0:11.1	You know the ones. They come from some number you've never seen before, and they ask you some out-of-context question.
0:17.0	Around for dinner today? Are you still in Boston?
0:19.9	If you answer and tell them it's the wrong number, they'll try to engage you in conversation.
0:24.7	It feels like a scam, but the actual scam part never seems to materialize.
0:28.9	PJ is the host of one of my favorite podcasts.
0:31.3	It's called Search Engine.
0:32.7	Each week, they answer a different question.
0:34.5	Some of them are big and existential.
0:36.8	Some are tiny and hilariously
0:38.6	specific. And with these texts, PJ got curious about what happens when you do keep these
0:44.5	scamy-seeming conversations going. When you do start to follow the crumbs, one of these texter's
0:49.7	starts leaving you. So he called up another journalist who'd also gotten obsessed with figuring out this
0:55.1	mystery. Like, who was on the other side of these messages? And how were they making their money?
1:01.4	Okay. August 2022, you get a text message from a woman named Vicki Ho. What did Vicki Ho want?
1:07.5	So Vicki said to me, hi, David. I'm Vicki Ho. Don't you remember me? And this is kind of weird,
1:17.6	because my name is Zique. Zeke Fox, author of the book Number Go Up inside Crypto's Wild Rise and
1:24.3	Staggering Fall. You may remember him from our episode on the explosion in new meme coins.
1:29.9	I wanted to get scammed.
1:32.8	So I was like, I want to see how this scam works.
1:35.8	So I wanted to give her what she was looking for.
	...

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