My moment of GLEE earlier today.

[sarren]

I posted this to dreamwidth way earlier, but it didn't seem to crosspost here (if it did and I'm the only one I who can't see it, sorry)Heavily Accented Caller: I am calling to inform you that we have detected your computer has been compromised etc (paraphrased, I let her talk for a couple of minutes

Comments

[theficklepickle]

Next time I think I'll just say 'just a minute' and leave them on the line, like someone I know does.

I've never quite got round to doing that although I'm very tempted. I used to get calls insisting that I *must* be such-and-such a finance office because our numbers were very similar; I was never quite cool enough to say "Hang on a minute, I'll go and look under the bed."

These days I have an answering machine; it's far less hassle.

[sarren]

We have an answering machine, but we are very bad at checking messages. though we have decided on a not answering between 6-8pm policy, though, peak time for scammers + dinner/kid bedtime routine.

[caitlen]

My Mum had this happen and called me in a blind panic. I told her there was no way they could tell anything about her computer & it spooked her so much she turned her computer off for daaaaaays. And then started having massive yelling arguments on the phone with the scammers LOL.

[sarren]

More power to her giving them shit!

[maharetr]

Heee! I got one of those a few months ago, and while I hadn't heard of that scam, I was still like '...yeah, what do you have my computer down as, again, hmm?'

Chaosmanor, who is home a lot more than me, says we get a lot of these calls to the house. It's kind of depressing, how brazen it is.

On another note entirely: I'm your 'secret' birthday person. What do you want? *is not subtle* :D

[sarren]

Ha, sorry, meant to get back to you on that. Fruit trees. Except I need to consult with Dragonfly about which/time of year etc, so no hurry about getting it for this Gathering :)

[maharetr]

I shall await your email of instruction, then! :D

[kremmen]

You let them off lightly. I got one of these, when I was getting dinner once and let them go through the whole spiel. It takes ages, because they spell everything out letter-by-letter. (But that makes it easy to do other things while they are prattling on.) Once we got to the downloading of remote control software stage, I told them it didn't run on my machine, so they asked me to download a different one. I'd finished my dinner by then, so instead of pretending to go along with them, I replied with "How stupid do you think I am?" and "Bored now!" and such. Even then, she kept trying to go back to the script!

Oh, and the next day I phoned the 1800 number of the company which provides the second of the remote control software packages and informed them what this particular client was doing with their product. It appears to be a reputable company and they didn't sound impressed.

[sarren]

Ha, good stuff. I was tempted to lead her on for a while, but I'm not techy enough, I probably would have screwed it up.