I get spammers who call me and say they have detected a virus on my computer so I ask them to cite the specifications of my system if they have access to it and they hang up on me.  Same with a vehicle warranty - You know my warranty has expired and yet you still have to ask what kind of vehicle I drive?

Funniest I’ve heard is people in big cities who don’t have cars or drive getting those notices that supposedly come from their car dealer. 

Showtalk said:

In general, most robocalls are intrusive and should not be allowed. Even aggressive debt collection is sometimes a scam. Old debt is sold and it’s past the cut off for collection but they keep trying. A relative passed away some years ago and collectors contacted me for payment when I had no legal obligation or even any connection to pay the debt.

Indeed. They drive a lot of people over the edge of despair, and I'm aware of a few who were pushed to suicide, and I thought I read about one case a few decades ago that made the debt collection agency call center the target of a mass shooting where the perp had been mercilessly threatened until he reached the breaking point and believed he had nothing left to lose, so might as well take as many of those SOBs with him. I think it happened back when "going postal" was a phrase coined but before the phrase "active shooter" made its way into the lexicon.

YWN666 said:

get spammers who call me and say they have detected a virus on my computer so I ask them to cite the specifications of my system if they have access to it and they hang up on me. Same with a vehicle warranty - You know my warranty has expired and yet you still have to ask what kind of vehicle I drive?

Oh, I love to waste their time and troll the heck out of them.

I kept one of the computer virus people on the line for about 30 minutes once on a slow day, and played the role of an elderly technopeasant to the hilt. Kept "making errors" and reading off error messages that would be only from a Unix or Linux system, even fake cried and did my best Oscar performance to sound like someone distraught to the point of desperation.

As for the car warranty scam call, I sounded like someone who didn't know anything about cars. Said "Oh, no - will it cover a new engine?" The fool said of course it did. So I led him as far as I could possibly do to waste as much time as possible and got all the way to the make and model of the car

"1958 Edsel. They say it needs a new engine." "378,472 miles"

The idiot actually tried to look that up before he finally figured out I'd been trolling him the whole time, and hung up.. Elapsed time, 21 minutes and 11 seconds. If I had more idle time, I'd try to break that personal best record to waste their time.

Showtalk said...

Funniest I’ve heard is people in big cities who don’t have cars or drive getting those notices that supposedly come from their car dealer. 

One thing I find funny is that I keep getting E-mails from my E-mail server company stating that my inbox was full and that there were undelivered mails that I should login to remove some of the older E-mails.

What I find funny about them is that my E-mail server company is a Japanese company and they only send me notifications when my E-mail server will undergo maintenance... and all of them are in Japanese. But the warnings I keep getting are all in English... LOL. That's a dead giveaway that it's not from my E-mail server company. And if you look a the full E-mail headers... sure enough, it's from somewhere else in the world. But even without looking at the full E-mail headers, just seeing it in English gives me a chuckle.

FWIW

Haha!  One of my favorite tricks is to pretend I'm hard of hearing so I keep asking the caller to talk louder.  I had one guy nearly screaming into the phone before he hung up.

I remember that.  It’s so easy now to block calls if they don’t change IP addresses. 

I did that once with a Windows Store employee. Of course there is no such thing.  I let them go through their whole speech and and said can you fix my IOS?  Oh yes, sure sure. Just give us access. Then I said it’s very difficult for you to fix my Windows program when I’m using an Apple product.  They hung up.

We even get similar here but they land in the queue until they are deleted.

You’d think they would catch on sooner, but if you sound vulnerable on the phone, they think they’ve got a live prospect. Then they realize they are the target.