The YouTube Frauditor Scam
“We’ll take pictures of your kid and put them on porn sites.”
YouTube has been an amazing resource for society. From learning to juggle to playing guitar to getting game tips to in-depth documentaries made by people passionate about a subject, there are thousands of hours of useful and enjoyable material on the platform.
And there are a few problems.
Because creators make money by getting clicks, over time they’ve learned to do absolutely anything to get those clicks. You may have seen the “pranksters” who commit crimes like armed robbery and home invasion and then yell, “It’s okay, this is for YouTube!”
A version of these pranksters are “first amendment auditors” (from here referred to as Frauditors). These people cloak themselves in the fiction that they are out filming cops who are doing bad things, and through that making societal change by exposing government corruption.
Of course, there have been people who helped changed society by filming cops doing bad things, and those people are heroes. They also didn’t do it for clicks and YouTube money.
When these YouTubers say “I’m going out to do an audit” what they mean is “I’m going to carry a camera around and find someone to annoy to the point where they either try to punch me or call the cops. If I’m really lucky the cops will arrest me, ‘cause that’s where the real clicks are.”
Most of them are complete failures at this, but a few make thousands a month.
At first the focus actually was on cops, but as cops figured out the scam it got harder to bait them into arrest, so auditors began finding other venues. They go to libraries and post offices — often several in a day — and walk around filming everyone in an intrusive manner until someone objects.
Their general plan is:
1. Annoy a random citizen to the point that they either blow up, or ask management to do something. If possible they’ll wander through private offices in government buildings and try to film sensitive info like health or banking information of customers.
2. Have a fight with management, claiming they’re allowed to film there (usually they aren’t actually allowed to film there but the employees tend to be uneducated about this). If possible, try to get the employee fired.
3. When trespassed, refuse to leave, saying “You have to commit a crime to be trespassed.” (This is a lie; an owner or employee or security, including in government facilities, can trespass a person for any reason, after which if they return to the property they can be arrested.)
4. Confront the cops who arrive, insult them with vile and humiliating names, and hope someone assaults them and/or arrests them. Threaten to sue everyone and end their jobs.
Frauditors aren’t intimidated when someone says “We’re calling the cops” because that’s exactly what they want, and they know that even if they’re arrested, the prosecutor will probably throw it out rather than charge them for being a jerk in public.
Frauditors are sometimes actively dangerous, as they’ll go to a crime scene and try to distract the officers as they do their job. Frauditors don’t care if the cops are trying to find an armed criminal, dealing with a dead body at an accident scene, or trying to break up a fight. They’ll jump right in and interfere.
As post offices and libraries got boring, the frauditors began preying on small business owners. They walk up and down a business street being rude to owners and customers and forcing their way into private offices and such, sometimes coming back multiple days in a row to ramp up the tension. Unfortunately, I have to advise any business owner to not engage these people and to kowtow to them if necessary, because when they get the slightest push back, they show the business address and phone number to their viewers, and tell them to trash the company on Yelp and to flood their office with calls and threats. Even a frauditor with only a few dozen viewers can cause a business to be ruined with fake online reviews.
I couldn’t possibly relate the hundreds of disgusting things I’ve seen frauditors do, but here are a few examples.
One of the most disgusting of these folks spent an hour+ wandering around a police station calling everyone the most vile racist, sexist and homophobic names (calling a female cop an “it with no tits”) while insisting he needed to fill out some paperwork. He realized that the station had alarm buttons in all the rooms so he started pressing all of them. Eventually he was arrested in the bathroom, which was at least humorous. (See video.)
This 4th of July a frauditor heard a police call on the scanner and went to a bridge where cops were attempting to defuse a big brewing fight. He inserted himself into it, did everything he could to interfere with the cops (then yelled at them for not doing their jobs) and pretty much tried to incite the crowd to violence. Ultimately the cops had to go physical with him, and he is likely to spend a few years in jail because he didn’t know how not to cross the line.
Two frauditors were going after random citizens at a school. When a mother objected to them filming her five year old, they said, “Not only are we going to film him, we’re going to put his image on porn sites.” Another case of not knowing the line — the next day realizing what they’d done, they deleted not only that video, but every single other video and channel they had on YouTube, attempting to hide the evidence.
Not only do these people not care in the slightest about the first amendment and government transparency, their only accomplishment has been to get the very freedoms they claim to care about restricted. The Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of government offices to restrict access and filming, and regions across the country have implemented new stricter rules reducing the access of citizens to government offices and officials. Florida just passed a 25 foot “halo” law requiring people to stay that distance from first responders. (This may or may not stand up to challenge, but it’s the direction things are going).
So: Making life miserable for random citizens, low level employees and small business owners while getting the government to crack down on everyone. Great job guys.
(Even watching a couple of minutes of this video will show you what kind of people these are…)