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I've watching few YouTube channels which call scam call centers mostly based in India and waste their time basically Including a channel called Kitboga and another one called The Hoax Hotel.

A common theme is that all want some prepaid card like Itunes card in order to fix your PC or pay your IRS taxes whatever. And all refuse to take bitcoins.

In fact, The Hoax Hotel did a video on that, tried real hard to make a scammer accept a bitcoin payment but the scammer declined, although he seems to be well aware of what bitcoin is.

That seems odd to me, a criminal organization, refusing to accept the de-facto currency for criminal activities. I have yet to watch a YouTube video where a scammer accepts bitcoin.

While the scammers might not know about cryptocurrency, their management must be well aware of them and I guess they should have told the employees how to use bitcoins like they teach them their scripts, I wonder why they haven't? Is it safer to get paid through prepaid cards?

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    Who says Bitcoin is the de-facto currency for criminal activity? I'd say that transfers to Western Union are...
    – forest
    Dec 18, 2018 at 1:44
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    The primary target of call center scams are your grandparents. Try calling you grandparents over the phone and walking them through buying some bitcoin.
    – CaffeineAddiction
    Dec 18, 2018 at 8:02
  • @CaffeineAddiction Yes I know, but I was surprised that they don't even offer that as an option. Plus from what I see on Youtube, they call grandma, tell her to go to a store even if it was 30min away, then buy a prepaid card then scratch it. There exist websites that make payments through crypto much faster than what is currently being asked from the elders
    – Lynob
    Dec 18, 2018 at 13:54
  • @forest true, if you have a fake id, not all criminals have that, but everyone can have cryptos
    – Lynob
    Dec 18, 2018 at 13:55
  • @forest You have 3 accounts, you may like to ask the admins to merge them into a single one so that your rep would increase, I asked them that a long long time ago, as a kid I had too many accounts, they merge all into 1, gave me a decent rep increase. If you want that, you could ask them
    – Lynob
    Dec 18, 2018 at 22:36

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Most people simply don't know how to buy bitcoin, and would probably require being walked through the process (expensive). Those few who do know how to buy bitcoin tend to be more tech-savvy, and perhaps less-easily fooled by call center scammers. A lot of people also associate bitcoin with criminal activity, which could also make it more-difficult to trick their marks into believing their call is legitimate.

From a scammer's point of view, it's best to use a few non-reversible payment methods which the most people are familiar with, and which the low-level call center scammers can verify easily. Compared to Western Union, Green Dot MoneyPak, and gift cards, bitcoin is just not that good an option.

You will find bitcoin and other cryptocurrency is often accepted by ransomware though.

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