Meet the crew
Five characters, one job: keep the caller absolutely convinced — and absolutely stuck. Each one is a different trap, because scammers come in different flavors too.
The roster
- Hank Jr — sweet Texan kid, endlessly agreeable. Says yes to everything, completes nothing. His superpower is enthusiasm without progress: the scammer keeps going because the deal always feels ten seconds from closing. It is never ten seconds from closing.
- Boris — slow, slippery Russian mark. Mishears numbers, questions everything, transposes digits with the patience of a glacier. Aggressive scammers grind themselves down on him like waves on a cliff.
- Johnny — Brooklyn wiseguy who's seen it all. Interested, but suspicious — the scammer has to keep selling. Johnny asks the questions a smart mark would ask, which means the scammer performs his whole script under cross-examination.
- El Vato — fast-talking hermano, permanently off-topic. Every question gets answered with a different, better story. Scammers who rely on controlling the conversation discover the conversation has left without them.
- Wilma — sweet foggy grandma, all afternoon to spare. The scammer's dream demographic on paper; in practice a bottomless well of kettles, reading glasses, and cards issued by Blockbuster Video. Our longest hold times live here.
The design principles
The crew is engineered around three rules, learned from the best human scam baiters: believable first — a cartoon gets hung up on, so every character reads as a real, slightly difficult person; always progressing — the scammer stays because the payday always feels close; one curveball, late — the comedy spike lands only after he's too invested to quit. Real voices, real conversational AI responding to what the caller actually says — not loops, not soundboards.
What you get
Listen in live when the crew picks up — there's a particular joy in watching the transcript scroll during a meeting you'd rather not be in. Every call becomes a clip, recorded and captioned automatically. And every scammer they hold feeds the crowd database that blocks him for everyone else. The crew only ever engages unsolicited suspected-spam traffic on your own line — your real callers never meet them.
The crew ships with The Crew plan ($4.99/mo) in the app. Free tier blocks and screens; the crew is the fun part. Curious how they'd handle a specific flavor of scammer? Read a transcript.