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I is disappoint. My secretary has been having the old 'Microsoft Service Centre' scam calls come through on her direct line. Nottingham number, though the caller in each case had a heavy Indian accent.
The last time it happened, I asked her to put the call to me and said I was very concerned to hear about these issues. I asked them what I could do to prevent all of the viruses, and the caller said "it is clear you are not taking this seriously. Stop wasting my time!" and hung up on me!
The standard of scam caller these days really has dropped...
You're not thier target demographic. Hence the hang up..
They will go through thousands of phone numbers a day hoping to snag one or two victims..
I had a no win no fee cold caller tell me to f&ck off and die once as I strung them along for a bit (they'd disturbed me anyway so I thought a good deed could be done keeping them away from you lot) when they asked if id had an accident I said I had and there were loads of people involved etc. they asked what my injury was to which I replied I had lost my memory and then they had the fu%$ums....
Got my grandads old RNLI whistle to deal with such cold calling pricks, a rather piercing howl comes out of it on full toot
I usually tell them straight that they’re lying. They inevitably deny it, so I tell them again that they’re lying. When they insist that they’re not, I tell them that Microsoft couldn’t possibly know there are viruses on my computer because it’s an Apple computer and has no Microsoft software on it, so kindly **** off!
I did have a very insistent scammer who said he was from BT, and that my computer was sending virus laden emails out. First time he called, I just said I was too busy to deal with this crap. He called next day, but the message was garbled on the answerphone, but I recognised his voice. He called again the day after, so I thought I’d string him along, as I had some time to spare.
First he asked me to tap the Windows key. He struggled a bit when I said I don’t have one on my keyboard. After several minutes, I told him my computer was an Apple Mac, so he then had to try to find the appropriate script to work from. He told me to open a Google window and tap in a URL. When I did, I got a little yellow warning triangle with a ‘!’ in it, which I clicked on, which told me, obviously, it was an unsecured site and my security and data may be compromised.
Again, obviously.
So I said, “oh, that’s interesting...”, “what is?”, he said... “I’ve just got this little yellow triangle with an exclamation mark pop up, telling me that’s an unsecured site...” at which point he hung up.
I just felt a little better about my day after that, it put a slightly smug smile on my face, having strung along one of those slimy assholes.
The last one to call the conversation went something along the lines of ...
Him ‘Hello this is Microsoft calling from the USA. Do you speak English?’
Me, ‘No, sorry not a word.’
Him ‘You just answered me in English ‘
Me ‘No, I didn’t ‘
Him ‘You just answered me in English again ‘
Me ‘ Look mate I told you I can’t speak a word of English’
Etc etc.
This conversation went round and round like this for about ten minutes before he hung up.
I usually answer "have you ever had an accident?" with "well, I shat myself once, does that count?"
If I am not doing anything when they ring I always piss about until they hang up, can be fun for a few minutes.
I used to have a Virtual Machine on VirtualBox that I kept specifically to string them along for as long as possible.
Record was 2 hours 45 minutes of call time but I had to have my tea half way through so I made them call back afterwards.
It was so funny watching them remoted into the virtual machine pretending they couldn't see the screen and asking me to click on a Pay now button which I pretended I couldn't see and kept on scrolling past it as they shouted "there is its, click that button" while forgetting they were pretending they couldn't see the screen.
Once I'd screwed them around and told them it was a VM and they were scum, I'd just shut it down and revert to the clean machine.
Had a few of these at works recently. Poor ‘Windows Technical Assistant’ was thrown off script by a simple ‘sorry, don’t think you can help us-we’re all Linux here...’
I had the "you've had a car crash recently" one the last week of my holidays when I was looking for a distraction.
Yes I had a crash, no I can't remember the reg number as I'm very rich own 15 cars and they're all insured through different companies. Well to be honest my drinking means I crash them quite often but usually bribe my way out of being arrested as I'm so rich.
Went on for a good 15 minutes, I despair at levels of education though. I gave my name as Walter Mitty.
Yes I had a crash, no I can’t remember the reg number as I’m very rich own 15 cars and they’re all insured through different companies. Well to be honest my drinking means I crash them quite often but usually bribe my way out of being arrested as I’m so rich.
I'm going to remember that one. Playing around with these calls has slowly become a hobby of mine. Generally the folks in my team stop working to listen in when I get one of these calls in the office & have even started giving marks out of 10 for length & quality of call these days.
I told the accident scammers that I had an accident but it was entirely my fault.
Didn’t like the look of the bastard so ran him over and killed him. Did time for murder - could I still claim?
They persevered for an admirable amount of time to be honest.