Scammers

Had one of the regular "This is BT openweb customer services..." calls yesterday. Strangely the phone number indicated it was coming from Austria. After establishing that they were not, in fact, in Austria but in 'City of London' I decided, as I was just doing a bit of housework, to play along with the phone on speaker.

Pretending to be less than tech savvy, I expressed understandable concern that my broadband connection had been compromised. Not to worry, they said, we can sort it out.
"What devices are connected to your broadband?"
"Well, there is a box in the hall that has the phone wire going to it"
"Do you have laptop?"
"What, a computer?"
"Yes"
"No"
"Is your phone connected to the internet?"
"I think so"
"Can you see Play Store?"
"What, on the phone"
"Yes"
"Well no, I'm talking to you on it"
"Can you go on speaker?"
"How do I do that?"

After detailed instructio (completely ignored, obvs) I managed to persuade him that I was connected to Play Store and was downloading the remote desktop app that he had instructed me to. However, I said, the internet connection was very slow, and the app was taking a long time to download. By giving him regular updates "7%.... 12%...... 17%...... 23%......"
I kept him going for 15 minutes while I hung out the washing and loaded the dishwasher. "97%.... nearly there, this is quite exciting!..."

"Now press "install""

"OK. Oh... it says 'insufficient memory'"
"You must delete an app you don't use"
"Sorry?"
"You must delete an app you don't use"
"Which one?"
"Any one"

A minute of dithering while I decide that I don't need "tetris".

"How do I delete it?"

He walks me through deleting the imaginary app. Back to Play Store. Install.
"It still says insufficient memory"
"Delete something else"

Eventually, getting bored, I 'hit install' and 'open'.

"What can you see on your screen?"
"Nothing."
"What can you see on your screen?"
"Nothing. Do you really think I would be this stupid? On the other hand I've kept you on the line for just under an hour when you could be scamming someone else."

This caused something of a reaction in Austria/City of London because suddenly there were several people shouting "Mudderfugger!! Mudderfugger!! at me.

How rude.

 

Splendid!
So many of these nasty people out there.
I reported one I while back but the police can do very little it seems.

 

I agree, when it comes to the "I'm from Microsoft we have detected network errors on your PC", I keep them on the phone long enough to stop them from scamming someone. However I usually end up calling the caller a despicable c*** or once when they asked me to install something, they asked what I could see, I answered that I could see their mother being f*****d by a horse.

 

Love it. Congratulations for sticking it to them.

 

A lot of these calls originate from India, so there's very little the police can do.

 

I recommend comedian James Veitch's YouTube videos about fighting back against vile scammers. Quite funny some of them.

 

Haha, well done.

The good news is at least he wasn’t insinuating you have carnal relations with your birth mother - whatever a mudderfugger is ! Lol.

 

I applaud you sir, well done.

When I get such a call, if I have the time I'll try and waste 30 minutes of theirs. I had one a couple of weeks ago from the "tax office", saying my national insurance number was used in multiple cases of fraudulent activity. It was comical and here is a very brief overview of what happened.

I was told that my NI number was being investigated, could get huge fines or jail time, basically anything to scare me.
Acted scared.
Scammer read through a LOT of scripts telling me all about the frauds and how much it was going to cost me.
Acted a bit more scared.
Scammer said he needed to speak with local police force and asked me to provide local police number, (which he also checked online to confirm).
Scammer pretended to call police while I was on hold but made sure I could hear the conversation in the background.
Scammer then told me the police were going to call me on my mobile and to go along with what they requested, (I assume this is when the police ask for account details but never got this far).

This took about 25 minutes and I was getting near to a meeting so I told him I was just wasting his time. Like you found, he suddenly launched into a furious tirade against me which made it all the better.

If we all did this it would stop.

 

Good work. I once had a call about having had an "accident", so went on a long rambling story about going out for a meal with friends, having a very hot curry and then messing myself on the way home, but turned out they weren't after that sort of accident.

I told another one that my car had collided with a tank in Iraq and had been a write off.

 

My favourite at the moment are the automated ones that say I'm in trouble with the National Crime Agency and will be going to prison. Can't say I've ever hung on to speak to the masterminds behind such a believable ruse...

 

I had one of these clowns, and I said "Yes it was awful, my wife was killed. I still haven't got over it." They just blithely carried on with the script, without missing a beat.

 

Sounds about right. I got into a row with one and asked him if his mum was proud of him being an ambulance chaser and it all got very heated.

 

Did he put her on the phone?

 

If I have time I like to keep them interested. I had one chap in India call me a F****** C***! I get more annoyed by the recorded message ones I get

 

I thought this was all very plausible until you said about " while I hung out the washing and loaded the dishwasher " I then realised it must have been a scam!

 

I am on furlough...

 

Joe Lycett one of the best with these -

 

One the worst ones I got was I tweeted at Virgin Broadband asking if there was an issue with my area. Within minutes I got a DM back from an account that was 1 character different from the actual Virgin account and looked the exact same. I replied at first because I didn't realise but luckily they made it quite obvious when they asked for my bank details... Quite scary how convincing some of these things are, i'd consider myself tech savvy so it's not hard to see how people fall for some of them.

 

There are some pretty funny channels on Youtube where scammers are run through Jeremy Beadle-esque capers. Some of them put a lot of effort in, using voice changers to sound like vulnerable grandmothers and creating fake code redemption site or banks where they can con the scammers into thinking that money has been lost.

Saw a pretty good one where the guy running the channel set up a fake Google play redemption code site and a fake ransomware message. He then redeemed a bunch of fake Google Play codes on the fake redemption site while the scammer screamed at the "clueless old grandmother", watching helpless on a screenshare as "thousands" was lost.

Pretty amusing seeing arseholes get so escalated as the money they think they're about to get vanishes into thin air.

 

Sounds good. Got any links?

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm22FAXZMw1BaWeFszZxUKw

This guy is one of the more popular ones. I don't watch all of the videos so I can't vouch for all of them, but the ones I have seen have been really amusing.

EDIT: this is the one I was describing above.

 

Came here to post this guy, sometimes I stick one on in the background when i'm bored. He's now developed an AI software that recognises what they've said and gives an automated response back that can waste hours of a scammers time without him even needing to do anything in return. Here's hoping he rolls out a fleet of them!

 

Haha nice! I haven't seen that yet but sounds brilliant.

 

Somehow they seem to know who the oldies are because my OAPs get them all the time, whereas they hardly ever call me.

I'm usually quite busy, so don't have time to delay them. After Indian "Graham" from Microsoft has introduced himself and given the bad news about the virus, I tend to rapidly ask the IP address of the machine infected (Come on Graham, you're from Microsoft, you must know the IP address!) and then hang up during the stammering.

For the "you've had an accident" one's, I put on a strong yokel west country accent (for some reason) and say "No, it weren't no accident. He annoyed me, so oi ran 'im over!"

 

Dunno if it's on everyone's mobile (I'm on Giffgaff and android) but when I block a contact as spam I also get the option to report it.
Also there are many www sites that you can dump numbers into. More than once I've double checked to see if a call was indeed spam and had it confirmed as someone else has reported it.

Luckily I get few calls these days. It won't stop the international callers but make sure you're registered here: https://www.tpsonline.org.uk/

 

I believe there are lists that do the rounds of likely targets. Scammers can buy them.

 

At a company I used to work for a relatively new employee got an email from the CEO asking him to do him a massive favour. The favour involved going out and buying the CEO a £1000 Google play voucher and texting him the code. The idiot only twigged when after texting the first code the scammer messaged back asking for another £1000. At this point he called the office back and realised it was a scam.

It totally blew my mind at the time, both how the person could be so stupid but also how people can actually scam your workplace with bogus emails from the CEO and so forth.

 

It's actually really easy to do, and defending against it can be very difficult without spending a fair amount of cash on a good secure email gateway.

I've seen it a few times. Twice it was the same scam as you mentioned (the "get me iTunes gift cards" nonsense). Once it was far more serious; someone spoofed the CEO and got someone in the finance department to wire transfer $40,000 out of the company. Miraculously, the chap kept his job (although he did lose a promotion he was about to get).

The latter incident wouldn't have happened if they had approved our security budget expansion I had asked for and allowed me to upgrade the SEG to an appropriate level, but the penny pinchers didn't think it was needed. Needless to say, that project got approved shortly afterwards.

The vast majority of cybersecurity breaches are achieved through social engineering of people, not through attacking systems. The best way to project your systems is to have educated users; unfortunately, getting people to take security education seriously is really f*cking hard.

 

Exact same thing happened to my GF’s boss! She fell for it but luckily the company let her expense it.

I just got one as an sms from the census.. looked very convincing. One to watch out for!

 

I guess being the boss they got a bit of slack thankfully, possibly also maybe more understandable as it wouldn’t be that unusual for them to be asking someone presumably relatively high up.

This guy was in the first week of the job, he was being trained so had a ‘buddy’ so to speak sitting next to him. He got the sack shortly afterwards, not because of that directly, as it was hardcore sales role and most did get the sack, but that was a contributor. They fact that he went flying out of the office as soon as he got the email obviously showed willing, but also a serious lack of judgement that he didn’t check with his buddy first, or any of the 100 other people in the office. They did give him the money back though when they sacked him.

 

Excellent GoBE.

I admire that you stuck at it for an hour.

I am the same as you, although I can't last an hour, in that I find it a duty to steal their time whenever I am free to do so. I urge people to do more of it if they can.

 

GF got one of these the other day "I thought you said you did the census for us!" she nagged. Luckily I asked what the domain name was and as soon as it didn't end in .gov I knew it was a scam haha