In 2009, some IT guy got tired of fielding telemarketing calls at work. So he built a fake old man named Lenny.
Lenny was sixteen audio clips. Soft, elderly Australian accent. A silence-detection algorithm waited 1.5 seconds after the caller stopped talking, then played the next clip. First four clips hooked the caller. Remaining twelve looped until they hung up.
The entire engine was a timer. Lenny would ask callers to repeat themselves, mention his third-eldest daughter, get confused about what was being sold. Telemarketers stayed on an average of nine minutes and forty-three seconds. Some went past half an hour. With sixteen audio clips and a silence detector.
He became a cult hero online, named after the creator’s elderly neighbor who kept a man-height pile of plastic bags in his backyard. Confused, warm, impossible to hang up on. That was the whole bit.
That was 2009. Sixteen clips and a timer.
Americans got 52.5 billion robocalls last year. Average victim lost $3,690. The creator economy already proved scambaiting prints money as content: Scammer Payback has 8.59 million YouTube subscribers and over a billion views. Kitboga clears $450K a year doing it live. They all have the same problem: every call is manual.
So picture a scambaiting studio. An AI bot picks up suspicious calls with an entertaining persona, keeps the scammer talking, and auto-cuts the highlights into subtitled vertical clips. Free tier for the satisfaction of hearing your scammer get played. Creator tier at $19-29/month for people who want to turn those calls into content. A thousand creators at $24/month is $24K MRR, and every free-tier clip that goes viral is marketing you didn’t pay for. The full playbook covers MVP scope, unit economics, and the moats worth building early.
Read the full playbook here:
52.5 billion robocalls hit Americans in 2025. The business worth building isn’t another blocker — it’s an AI persona that wastes the scammer’s time and turns the transcript into a clip.
From the Vault:
Credit unions and community banks handle pig-butchering and authorized-fraud cases with Word docs and Outlook folders. No purpose-built investigation workbench exists — and FinCEN just created the demand.
Local businesses already pay for campaigns like this. GooseChase charges $400+ per event and ignores the neighborhood coffee shop market entirely. The software gap is wide open.
