With more young people drawn to the world of fraud, from ‘squares’ to ‘clicking’ and ‘mule herder’, Kaf Okpattah knows the language
Kaf Okpattah can speak the language of scammers. “Squares is one word which comes up a lot. That’s bank cards,” he says. “Fullz … that’s a person’s full financial information.”
In his new book, Scam Nation, he goes through more. “Clicking”, which means using stolen details to commit online crime; “addy”, which is used for the shipping address for fraudulently bought gear; and “mule herder”, meaning someone who recruits and manages people accepting stolen funds. Many of these are words he learned at school, he says.
Okpattah describes contemporaries using stolen “fullz” to buy designer trainers, getting the details from the dark web and having their spoils sent to unrelated “addys”. They seemed to discuss it casually, only thinly disguising what they were up to from their teachers.
“Fraud was part of my life, just by the nature of when I grew up, who I grew up with and where I grew up,” he says when we meet to talk about the book. “All of my friends were doing it and discussing it and DMing each other about it. So it was just part and parcel of normal life.”
