A Delhi man used ChatGPT to make a scammer beg for forgiveness. The story, shared on Reddit, has since gone viral, and the internet is impressed by the man’s smartness.
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A bizarre scam story from Delhi has grabbed attention online after a man revealed how he turned the tables on a fraudster using ChatGPT. In a detailed post titled “Used ChatGPT to locate a scammer and made him beg me” on r/delhi, he narrated how a routine attempt at impersonation spiralled into a full-blown tech-driven sting operation.
The incident began when he received a Facebook message from someone posing as his college senior, an IAS officer, offering “Army transfer/cheap goods.” The scammer claimed a “CRPF officer friend” was being relocated and was offloading premium appliances and furniture at heavily discounted rates. But he immediately sensed something was wrong, noting that his actual senior already had his phone number. After confirming on WhatsApp, he realised, “It was fraud.”
Instead of ignoring or blocking the fake profile, he decided to play along. Soon, another number contacted him, this one sporting a profile picture of someone in an army uniform and sent photos of items for sale, pushing him to make a payment through a QR code. The impersonator grew increasingly aggressive, urging him to send the money quickly. “This felt immediately wrong,” he wrote, describing how the scammer amped up the urgency as soon as payment came up.
Pretending he was having trouble scanning the QR code, he quietly turned to ChatGPT for help. He asked the model to generate a fake payment page, one that appeared genuine but was capable of capturing the user’s location and front-camera image. “I fed the AI a prompt for a simple, functional webpage,” he explained, and within minutes the code was ready. After hosting the page online, he told the scammer that uploading the QR code there would “expedite the payment process.”
Blinded by greed, the scammer clicked the link. The moment he opened it, the trap worked. The man instantly received the scammer’s precise GPS location, IP address, and even “a clear, front-camera snapshot of him sitting.” He then confronted the scammer by sending back his own photo and the collected details.
What followed was pure chaos. The scammer panicked and began calling repeatedly from multiple numbers — all belonging to him — pleading for mercy. He begged the man not to escalate the matter, at one point promising he would “abandon this line of work entirely.”
Though the man admitted the scammer would probably return to his schemes soon enough, he didn’t deny the thrill of the moment, saying “the satisfaction of stealing from a thief is crazy.”
