USPS text scammers duped his wife, so he hacked their operation

I hate that it kicks off with "DISCLAIMER: This is not my work. I would never and don't condone illegal hacking of scammers"

You know what? I do. We all should. These scammers are awful people and deserve to be attacked. I am tired of toothless authorities like CISA and the alphabet agencies in the US doing next to nothing about it unless some YouTube scam baiter does the work for them. Scammers destroy people, not just financially, but emotionally as well, even driving some victims to suicide. As far as I am concerned, any wannabe hacker out there should be using these scammers for target practice.

vigilantism can spiral out of control. While it makes sense in this scenario, it's because the scammer is obviously breaking some law and is criminal. What happens if it wasn't so obvious?

If society doesn't want vigilantes than it must take an active role in pursuing and punishing criminals.

Society does take an active role through police, fbi, etc etc

Vigilantes are criminals too so society takes an active role in pursuing and punishing them as well.

We deem vigilantes criminals because we have no way to hold them accountable if they infringe on someone's rights.

Society is supposed to take an active role, but sometimes they have other priorities.

Big companies getting hacked or scammed make headlines and generate FBI action. People like me, not so much.

Unless I'm mistaken, we vigilantes are deemed criminals because it is, ironically, against the law to enforce the law on someone else without being granted that authority by the state.

Its still not quite accurate to deem vigilantes as criminals though. Unless they've been charged and convicted they aren't technically a criminal.

The people receiving vigilante justice aren't technically criminals, either, by that logic. You're inflicting punishment on innocent (not proven guilty) people.