Wikipedia Sucks!

I've been getting a lot of calls on my landline from fake contractors wanting to give me a free estimate. Since I don't really use the landline I just put an outgoing message pretending to be someone answering the phone which works amazingly well.

I was pleased to see that hundreds of phone scammers in India were busted recently
https://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/1 ... ne-cartoon

I'm getting calls offering to fix my computer. I tell them I don't have a computer and ask if they are offering me one. They don't speak English well so I usually have to repeat this a few times before the penny drops.

Flip Flopped wrote:I'm getting calls offering to fix my computer. I tell them I don't have a computer and ask if they are offering me one. They don't speak English well so I usually have to repeat this a few times before the penny drops.

Yeah the ones calling me sound american.. from what I gather their scam is to actually come out to your house and either scope you out for robbery , get a deposit on the work and never do the work or they just do a really shitty job meanwhile never giving you any real info on how to contact them so you'd beable to sue them. They seem to prey on the elderly and people who are vulnerable.

suckadmin wrote:

Flip Flopped wrote:I'm getting calls offering to fix my computer. I tell them I don't have a computer and ask if they are offering me one. They don't speak English well so I usually have to repeat this a few times before the penny drops.

Yeah the ones calling me sound american.. from what I gather their scam is to actually come out to your house and either scope you out for robbery , get a deposit on the work and never do the work or they just do a really shitty job meanwhile never giving you any real info on how to contact them so you'd beable to sue them. They seem to prey on the elderly and people who are vulnerable.

Right, you have a landline so they know you have a residence. :/

I've gotten to know "Emily" fairly well. She calls semi-weekly to tell me I've won a free vacation. She fakes being a real person who's having headset problems, but she's a recording. Your fake answering machine recording must be pretty convincing.

When the situation sucks for some customer service person I'm stuck with on the phone, governmental or not, I tell the person very sincerely that I hope they have their resume ready because that company/agency doesn't deserve them and they are a shoo-in for a much better job. This has gotten me some really helpful tidbits of information, probably stuff they weren't supposed to tell me. They also open up about when they plan to jump ship.

Flip Flopped wrote:

suckadmin wrote:

Flip Flopped wrote:I'm getting calls offering to fix my computer. I tell them I don't have a computer and ask if they are offering me one. They don't speak English well so I usually have to repeat this a few times before the penny drops.

Yeah the ones calling me sound american.. from what I gather their scam is to actually come out to your house and either scope you out for robbery , get a deposit on the work and never do the work or they just do a really shitty job meanwhile never giving you any real info on how to contact them so you'd beable to sue them. They seem to prey on the elderly and people who are vulnerable.

Right, you have a landline so they know you have a residence. :/

I've gotten to know "Emily" fairly well. She calls semi-weekly to tell me I've won a free vacation. She fakes being a real person who's having headset problems, but she's a recording. Your fake answering machine recording must be pretty convincing.

Heh.. yeah I have gotten the calls on my cell where the recording pretends to be having headset problems.. I think I even got it once on my landline. In fact those calls are what gave me the idea to put the outgoing message. Once I had actually talked to them a few times and knew what their script was I just left an outgoing message where I pause and give vague answers... or just say um or I don't know or I have no money.

for the past couple of weeks I had not being getting many calls from them and I think they had kinda figured out what was going on but they must have hired a new guy and he called and talked to the recording until it beeped at him then he called back thinking he had been disconnected and talked to the same outgoing message until it beeped at him again.. I think he finally figured it out after that. LOL

suckadmin wrote:<snip> they must have hired a new guy and he called and talked to the recording until it beeped at him then he called back thinking he had been disconnected and talked to the same outgoing message until it beeped at him again.. I think he finally figured it out after that. LOL

Every time the telemarketers call I get to do weird things like talking jibberish, claiming I live in another dimension, "talking" in fart noises, etc. ALL of them are Skype spoofers; you hit *69 and the service can't trace them. I have never purchased a single thing by telephone.

I need to attach a mixing board to my phone and run stuff like this to scare them off, or just mix in prank call recordings like this one or one of the classics by the Pittsburg Fightsters: .

if it matters I vote for the Pokemon Rap.....although I'm forced to admit the ChrisV420 call is pretty funny.

ericbarbour wrote:if it matters I vote for the Pokemon Rap.....although I'm forced to admit the ChrisV420 call is pretty funny.

Well, I get two kinds of unsolicited calls: the telemarketers, and the dropped calls. The latter are endlessly annoying, because it's either some of the people I've told off in the past, or there are a couple of broken autodialers out there. I get to hear dead air (with clicks or without clicks), or boiler-room noise and it hangs up, or the bizarre "goodbye" call where there is dead air and then a recorded voice of a woman saying that word before the machine hangs up. Even the hang-up calls are untraceable due to everybody in that "industry" using Skype and number spoofing. The National Do Not Call list is a joke because of spoofing and I was on that list before the practice was common.