PC support con? just happened!

Yes, as others have already said, this is a well-known scam.

Anyone with a bit of IT knowledge can have great fun with these jokers, though. 🙂

I made a mormon cry once, and his pal was most upset with me too. He told me that they had come all the way from America to be missionaries in Scotland, and I shouldn’t try to undermine their faith.

Favourite Telemarketer wind up –

Right Here

A friend of mine kept two Samaritans on the doorstep..

Samaritans being a very worthy and totally non-religious telephone-based organisation devoted to comforting and possibly saving people for whom suicide has become an option, I am not sure they actually make house calls.

Unless your friend was in total extremis with the noose round his neck? 😮

Moggy

If you have the time, and are armed with a little knowledge of the Bible, you can have fun with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Sadly, we don’t get many of them around here these days, but they make excellent sport, almost as good as telephone cold-callers! :diablo:

A friend of mine kept two Samaritans on the doorstep in the rain for nearly an hour arguing that God was an alien who crash landed on the outskirts of Bethlehem and the star was simply his mother ship in orbit.

I agree with Paul F, these malignant turds need to be treated as sport if you have the time.

I agree ! I used to hand the phone to the kids when they were younger, so I got 20 mins free babysitting time which was enough time for a coffee and digestive or two. A whistle is good fun but sometimes when you put the phone down it takes a while to clear the line and get a dial tone.

There is a serious side though, my mum, 73 at the time gave over bank details and card details to buy an “energy saving device”….. then was so worried she had to change all of her cards etc….. there is a streak of evil in these people that while we laugh at and can have some sport with, can cause upset and loss with folk not equipped to deal with them.

Baz

They phoned my missus up yesterday as well, he said he was from Microsoft and had spotted an issue with my pc. She told him that he needed to speak to me as I was the “expert” (at that point I lol’d), he promptly got very shirty on the phone and hung up.

I’ve had a three or four of these calls recently and I love the way that they assume that I spend all day sitting at my desk with my computer on (although that’s nearly true :o).

I agree that wasting as much of their time as possible is a must (and great ‘sport’)! :diablo:

I usually pretend my (very old) computer takes a long time to boot-up (but not as long as my actual computer :rolleyes:) plus I like to pretend that my phone and computer are in different rooms (sometimes this is true if they ring my home number).

I have a habit of leaving my spectacles by the phone and have to keep going back for them; I also get them to spell-out everything…..twice!

Once I was asked to press the ‘CTRL’ key; try-as-they-might they couldn’t make me understand where the key was…..it took them a full twenty minutes to realise I wasn’t coming back after I went to look for the ‘instructions’ that came with the computer! 😀

There was a brilliant radio 4 series and a book by ‘Bob Servant’ where he took the scammers for a ride. http://www.bobservant.com/BobServantEmails.html

‘It was funny when Peter Sellers did it but yours is rubbish.’

Stuart H – I like that one! 😀

My favourite for cold-callers (double glazing salesmen, etc.), is: “Hang on a sec – I’ll just get a pen & paper.”

My current record for leaving them hanging is 46 minutes. :diablo:

EDIT:
Autostick,
There is a whole thread on The Other Forum (PPRuNe) titled Pesky Nigerian Scammers.

I have used several responses.

‘Excuse me, there’s someone at the door’, leaving them hanging to see how long they’ll wait – 15 to 20 minutes actually.

Or, ‘It was funny when Peter Sellers did it but yours is rubbish’,

‘What is rubbish sir?’

‘Your comedy accent’.

Indeed, the longer you can keep them tied up the better. Not only is it costing them money, it’s also wasting time they could be using to con someone perhaps a little less switched on than the members of this forum seem to be.

I’ve had several such calls over the last fortnight, three in one day.

Of the three, I ‘played’ the first two to such an extent that the first gave up after half an hour, the second I pretended to be an IT Support chap and told them in no uncertain terms that I knew what their game was, the third, when they mentioned “computer” and “error messages” I yelled at them to Foxtrot Oscar with such volume that it brought my neighbour rushing round (she thought I’d fallen!).

The last one was yesterday (29th); I managed to keep the muppet running in circles for almost an hour.
Finally, I pretended to “cave in”, and asked him for the website.
He gave me the URL, which I typed in on my partner’s laptop (switched off).
I said, “My antivirus system has flagged it. It says ‘This website is suspicious.'”
“Oh, you need to turn off your antivirus program and firewall, if you have one, Sirr.”
At this point I told HIM to F.O., after giving my thoughts on his parentage…

Some may see this as a waste of time; I see it as a service to others.
The longer I can keep them tied-up wasting time with me, the less likely they are to find someone who might actually fall for this stuff.

I often find when you get these Indian cold callers the best form of defence is attack, I often start of with you need to speak clearer your Pakistani accent is disconcerting… Now calling an Indian a Pakistani really gets them going, you get the I am Not a Pakistani, which of course opens up other avenues like surely you must be, I can definitely hear a Pakistani accent in your voice, what part of Pakistan do you come from?

It is a con, get caller ID and an answer phone, if you get international simply do not pick it up, they cease when they think it is a dead phone.. They are trying to get you to load on a Trojan for them to access your passwords and accounts, banking paypal etc

I agree with Paul F, these malignant turds need to be treated as sport if you have the time.

I work in IT and have always wanted to get one of these calls to see exactly what they were trying to get access to

Ditto. I have a Win7 virtual machine sitting in ESX and firewalled that I’d point them at. They’d think they were on a real PC but would be nicely contained.

Anyone here had anything similar?

Indeed. I wound-up one ‘lady’ so much she resorted to calling me a single, rather insulting word that implied I had had carnal knowledge of a close female relative

I counted that a major win

Moggy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Oof_Py2mCE

grail call

I work in IT and have always wanted to get one of these calls to see exactly what they were trying to get access to as many of the people I deal with have had similar calls, about 4 weeks ago on a Saturday morning I finally got my wish.. after making them spell out everything slowly “how do you spell event, what do you mean by cmd etc her patience was wearing thin, 30 minutes of slow progress can do this to you:diablo:
I then told her that 12 years in IT support meant that I thought if I had any issues I would see to them myself, she put the phone down on me:diablo:
the reason I called it a grail call is most of the guys I work with are dying to cause these people more inconvenience but we never seem to get them