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For me it was always Microsoft support service. With a very bad accent some guy told me I have a virus and just have to look how many entries are in my event log for proof.
As I didn't immediately ended conversation to see where it goes, I was handed to another support guy who told me I have to download their expensive anti-virus tool and need to pay by credit card.
Somehow I was kicked out of the line without warning as I was probably considered too stupid to follow their orders.
At least I kept two of them busy for about 20 minutes so they couldn't scam other people at the same time.I got one of those calls when I got in the car to go home from work. Since I'd be bored I kept him on the line, pretending I was a really old guy who had to walk to get to the computer and boot it up slowly. Strung him along for about fifteen minutes before traffic eased up and I had to focus more on driving.
When I told him I was bullshitting him he swore at me and hung up.
At least I kept two of them busy for about 20 minutes so they couldn't scam other people at the same time
They will scam other people anyway, just 20 minutes later.
Do the scammers really decide to work more hours to make up for people wasting their time?
It depends on overtime payment and team building measures like always. And as it's already illegal why not a threat or two to increase performance. Not layoff level, but concrete shoes level.
By wasting a scammer's time you are not preventing people from being scammed, you are just delaying that moment.
That doesn’t really make sense if you think about it though. You are making the scam less profitable to run. Even if the scammers work overtime to make up for wasted time, at the end of the day someone is paying them to be on the phone.
"The last time my windows crashed was when the asshole neighbour's kids were playing baseball. It ended up being this whole thing where those kids and my kids got shrunk and I accidentally threw them out before I realized what had happened and everyone got pretty upset before everything was resolved and we became good friends. So you're saying that that happened because of a virus? If you get rid of the virus, will you also undo the whole shrinking thing?"
Or act like you have a real virus. Like it keeps opening ads every two seconds and bitch at them for adding so many ads to Windows. Like try to act like an amazing mark for them but make them work for your money--not because you aren't willing to give it to them but because you're so dumb you've left things in a state where work needs to be done before that can happen.
It Bitcoin gets mentioned, ask why anyone would want you to cut up a coin and send them the bits to an address your smart friend thinks is on Uranus or something.
I've seen videos of people that install the remote access software on a VM, I wonder if there's any where they've set it up to pop up new ads every 2 seconds. Even better if they make them wait while they look at each ad to decide if they are interested and insist some just get moved to the side instead of closed because they want to pursue them after the call. Cherry on the cake would be for the ads to be about things like penis reduction or softening pills or hiring a service to fend off all the local singles so you can get on with your day.