Telemarketing scams

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I can't seem to get rid of these scammers and telemarketers although I haven't been getting as many now that I'm reporting them to my Attorney General after a complete failure of stopping these calls by registering with the DO NOT CALL Registry.


But, I got my revenge today and made a fool out of this one guy that insisted that I have trouble with my computer. Here is the conversation which I have in an audio file as well.


This time I was ready for this guy with the heavy accent and quickly turned on the speaker phone and recorder.

The convsation went like this:

Me: Hello?....................................................Hello?...............................................................................Hello?
Caller: How about your computer?
Me: What about my computer?
Me: What about my computer?
Caller: On your computer is in trouble!
Me: Oh, it is? How do you know it is?
Caller: garbled
Me: How do you know that I even got a computer?
Me: Hello?
Caller: Do you have a computer ma'am?
Me: Well you ought to know that because you are telling me there is stuff wrong with it.
Me: And did you know that I'm on the DO NOT CALL list?
Me: Ah, DO NOT CALL Registry, did you know that?
The caller immediately hangs up.

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to tell him that I was recording our conversation because he hung up on me.


I just decide to start having a little fun and see how foolish I can make them.

So how do you all deal with these scammers that call you?

I just ignore any caller ID I don't recognize. (For that matter, I ignore a lot of them that I do.) If someone is already doing something illegal (running a scam), doing something else illegal (ignoring DNC) is hardly going to stop them. So the DNC thing has been an abysmal failure. It's like if someone drives off the road into a playground and kills a bunch of children, they aren't going to care that one of their taillights is out. The DNC is incredibly minor compared to the scam itself.

I've noticed the scam calls come in waves. I'll have none for several weeks, then a flurry of them. I suppose the scammers dial different regions and exchanges sequentially, and it takes them a while to get back to my number.

Like all scams, there is a chain of plausible deniability. Outbound dialing services rent lines to scammers, and can deny they know they are scammers if it ever comes up. Scammers know how long they can use a particular outbound service before they move on. You just can't stop it, because the scammers are ahead of the game. Running their hustle is all they do, so they're better at it than the people who try to stop them.

I built a PIC device that lets the phone ring only for those caller IDs that I've programmed into it. The rest get those three annoying tones and the "We're sorry..." message that indicates a disconnected number.

I enjoy speaking to them in other languages. They don't seem too interested in calling you at all hours of the day after that...

I let all the numbers I don't know go to voicemail. If it's a scam, they usually don't leave a message.

A couple of times when I got spam texts, I texted death threats in response.

Oh wait, that was spam emails. Spam texts use numbers you can't respond to.