I say I'll just be a momenet, please wait. And then go and do something obvious. Take a piss (or dump) and flush the bog, wash hands. Say I'm just gona make brew and do something else. get back to the phone, Walk around, hoover, what ever. Just get on with my life and leave them waiting. The champ is rining my brother on my mobile, putting him on speaker and talking about the plans for the weekend. Put the telly on in the background. I just don't engage at all.
I must admit, that's genius. Since making this thread I've gone from dreading scam calls to eagerly anticipating one. So many new ideas.
Had a customer come in with her computer to get us to clean it out after falling for the scam. While cleaning it out I noticed a file on the desktop named Contact. I opened it and found their company name and phone numbers. Googled the address and on the search results it was saying the website is dangerous. I can't seem to remember the name though...
Was it British or overseas? (Think I can guess already.) I hate that I can't find out who these people are, or where they are, and that there's no legal recourse against it even though it would be illegal in this country (fraud).
Bloody hell. Just caught my dad on the phone to some Indian guy who'd directed him to logmein and was claiming to be from 'The Microsoft'. Rather close call. He got pretty pissed off after being told he wasn't actually from 'The Microsoft'. I then talked to someone claiming to be his supervisor who was remarkably persistent... even after being informed that the PC in question was running Linux! In hindsight, I should have fired up a VM and had some fun.
Ehh, we knew when it was telemarketers when my brother turned 18. He has a name a mirror of my dad's, which happens to be one letter difference between a semi-common name. Interesting when they A)Say the wrong name, B)Slaughter the pronunciation completely.
The real big problem with these calls is that, and I'm not sure if I said this earlier but the majority of them are calling from India/Asia etc. The issue with that is they are hard to stop, hard to trace and nothing an UK enforcement agency can do about stopping it. I'm not sure if this is common knowledge on these forums, but I work for Consumer Direct, and I took a call from someone who had not only fallen for this scam once, not even twcie but they'd paid out 4 times to these companies at £120 a time. On their Debit Card ! I actually called Trading Standards in that persons area to see if there was anything they can do, and more than phoning the consumer and getting Trading Standards to just confirm what I'd said they were unable to help in anyway as the consumers money had sessentially left the UK, the contract had been formed in a country outside the UK and there was literally nothing they could do. It's the same with the inheritance scam letter thats doing the rounds aswell.
I was named after my dad, it causes all sorts of headaches. He goes by the first name, initial, last name. I go by initial, middle name, last name. This works well in writing, but when spoken it gets muddy because our first name is pronounced the same as an initial (Gee, wonder what it is? ) so there's no way to tell if they're calling me using initial, middle, last or my dad using the full name. It also means that full, initial, last sounds the same as initial, initial last but that's less common. It's an absolute nightmare trying to sort between who's who on services where we both have accounts because of this. On the bright side it makes for a lot of fun leading on cold callers pretending to be the other.
Fixed that for you! Simplest answer:- keep a whistle or air-horn by the phone. Deaf scammers make no phone calls.
Actually, now I think about it, I haven't received any more of their calls since I managed to get the guy in the call quoted above to hang up on me. I think for them, hanging up on the customer is a big no-no and reflects badly, so I've now taken it as my mission statement to (1) waste as much of their time as possible (every minute is more of their company's money, after all) and (2) get them to hang up on me so that the call is more of a waste of their time than mine.
Ask them to call around for a visit to discuss it, sure will be a hell of long round trip from India for a NO
