When I suspect a cold caller, I lift the receiver and keep absolutely silent. That way I am in total control, cannot get drawn into an argument etc. I am soon going to start giving a blood curdling scream after the silence to see if I can give them a heart attack ! Simon.
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The first time that I tried this it was actually a real person with a genuine need to speak to me.
So I never tried it again!
tim
On Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:38:28 +0100, Roger Cain boggled us with:
I've had the sky box faulty one. I played along for a while, asked them what problems they could see from their end. They gave me some guff about operating systems needing update and potential hacking.
They hung up after 10 mins when I said I didn't actually have a sky box.
On Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:02:44 -0400, S Viemeister boggled us with:
My boss is a man called Ruth. We also have a man called Lynn who works with us !
Can be quite confusing when trying to find them for the first time if no one warns you in advance.
Yes, absolutely. Organised call centres in Mumbai or Bangalore train their staff in how to pretend to be English. They use fake names, they even check the BBC news etc. beforehand to be able to make "smalltalk". They are truly, awfully bad at doing this convinvcingly. If you're in the mood though (I love my good speakerphone), you can have fun. Especially if you can kick them off onto cricket scores or something, then deliver a convincing tirade on the Satanic Overtones of cricket. If I put the phone down on _them_, it's a failure.
Today's junk phone call was about a car accident I had in November (or October) 2009. Where someone went into the back (or maybe the side) of me. In what _might_ have been a Vauxhall Corsa. No other details given (as usual they claimed the DPA prevented this!), certainly not my own details, which they very obviously didn't know. Particularly the bit were I didn't drive more than about 50 miles in November, and certainly wasn't hit by anything doing it.
I suspect it's a lot like stage psychics. The more you slip to them, the more they know how to drive after the ambulance they're chasing.
Likewise. Click and then the background hubbub of other telemarketeers. Is this Mr. Lamb? Who wants to know? Click!
regards
Oops, thats certainly a risk. Did they suffer any lasting injury ? Usually the person at the other end will say hello and you recognize the voice. Sometime you recognize the cold caller ! Simon.
It's a phone scam.
Yep - they don't pass the Turing Test.
'Cold reading'
From a Mate who works for Computer Repair Company.
We've just had a call from a customer who has been scammed!! A call was made from a firm - GTS Online Limited - claiming links to Microsoft who had reported the computer was full of errors. They then proceeded to take over their PC and 'repair' the faults.
The 'solution' cost £300 off the credit card. An expensive call.
Baz
Yes but it needs to be accessible if you want to see the light signals for the answerphone. I decided it was easier just to go all cordless around our house and plug the base station into it.
Tim
I've had the "your skybox contract is coming to an end, please renew it now" type of call, when they couldn't even tell me the contract number that was coming to an end, or the amount and the date on which their current arrangements took from my bank account, or even the bank my account was with. They were a bit upset when I told them that I considered them to be scamming me and I would not talk to them again, putting the phone down on them. Shortly afterwards, I started to get regular scam automated phone calls from the USA with accompanying ship's horn sounds telling me I had won a cruise of some sort. I don't know if the two were related.
I've also had the "we believe your computer is infected with a virus" type of call, when they couldn't tell me any more details about the PC (IP address used, as it was a static one, and so on). WE got silent phone calls after that one for a while.. Finally we've had the "survey please" type of phone call, and as you say, they get very insistent and almost aggressive when I refused to talk to them, ringing back a few times. We also got the silent phone call antics as well, though this went on for a few weeks, not a few days.
Because they almost all of them originated from India, Sri Lanka, or Pakistan (given the accents involved), BT said they could do little except block all international calls. Because we have relatives in the USA and China, we couldn't take them up on their measly and inadequate offer.
We've escaped this, to some extent, having now moved to China, but we get in China a new variant: regular scamming txt messages, in Chinese, sent easily because txt messages to other users on the same network and in the same city can send have as many txt messages as they like free of charge, and there are no systems in place to deal with such scum.
There's a video on youtube that is a transcription of some guy who has had a way of dealing with such callers, similar to those who take on the scammers that talk about sharing X millions of pounds from some Nigerian bank: he pretended to be a policeman investigating the murder of the guy they were trying to phone, and got round to wanting their real name, address, and whether they were the intended callee's gay lover. The key was to make THEM frightened or apprehensive enough to stay on the line, and then to begin to hand over information that may cause problems to them. I can't access youtube easily from within China, but it quite funny to listen to. I would love to try to implement that means of dealing with them myself.
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