http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/aug/31/why-nigerian-email-scams-work/transcript/
" The interesting insight is that what the spammers need to do is filter out people who aren’t gullible enough. They need to filter out the people who might respond but wouldn’t in the end send them any money."
A new scam that’s everywhere these days is some Indian dude calling you “from Windows” to tell you you have a virus. I got this call a few months ago and messed with the guy for a while. Eventually I told him I have a mac and don’t run windows. He disagreed with me and asked that I pay him $500.
Wow, that’s really smart. I always thought that it was dumb of them of to obviously have mis-spellings and have indicators that it was clearly a scam. But it seems like these guys were one step ahead.
I had this happen a few months ago. At one point I asked the guy what country he was in, and he responded ‘Asia’. I told him Asia is not a country, and he started to get upset with me. I kept messing with him until he finally hung up on me, but then I started to worry that he may actually be able to remotely f up my computer.
Now you guys made me want some scammer to call me, so I can mess with him…
ha ha ha ha ha ah ha ah ah ah aha…shut the fudge up frolicking douchebag.
So what are people’s favorite ways to mess with callers? I am not devious enough to think of anything good, but I would love to waste a caller’s time creatively now and then…
I always tell them I would be happy to send money, provided they send me money first to assist with the processing, (“Don’t worry, I’ll send twice as much back, it’s just an administrative issue.”). No one has gone for that yet, but it’s fun to turn the call around on them.
A lot of the time I put the phone on hands-free and let my 3-year old son talk to them (he’s quite talkative and has good pronounciation). If the call gets out of hand I’ll step in, otherwise I figure it’s a good way to waste the scammer’s time and provides some entertainment when my child starts to tell the guy about the latest Wiggles concert.
I used to tell telemarketers I was very interested then just lay the phone down and go on with whatever I’d been doing. Sometimes I’d pick the phone back up like 10 minutes later and they’d literally still be talking. So, I’d tell them this sounded fascinating but could they reexplain the first part cause I was confused, then put the phone back down and go back to my activities.
Clearly, stringing them along is key. There must be a list of “tell tale traits” that scammers use to identify victims. Someone needs to figure out that list, act it out, and then deliver an M. Night Shyamalan-like twist at the end.
Not that I have a lot of opportunities to do this… the closest thing to scammers that have called me are those college alumni donation people…
Black Swan - interesting article, btw. Out of curiosity, does anyone ever try to convince them to use their effort/intelligence to do good?
^ what’s this supposed to mean?
^ Beats me, but given the unnecessary usage of juvinile profanity serving no purpose, I may have tweaked a few of the f-bombs.
My guess is Isildurrr took the fact that it was an Indian as some sort of insult.
durrr… o_O
i do the same, but always in poor grammar and broken English similar to the style of the original scam email. the goal is not so much to get any money from them, but to instigate hostilities among scamming groups by leading them to believe that a fellow scamming group is encroaching on their territory
Hopefully that’s directed at me. I’ve never been described as “frolicking” before.
I don’t remember writing that.
I just woke up in a bed of my own puke.ignore me
I think it was supp to be fucking douche not frolicking.
that gif is stupid.
winning
lol…you have no idea.
the place yest was filled with truck/rickshaw/taxi drivers.95 % male.