This is nore realistic than a number of people realize I think: I happen to be known as a nice sysadmin and therefore people call me so I got a number of stori

This is nore realistic than a number of people realize I think: I happen to be known as a nice sysadmin and therefore people call me so I got a number of stories. Many of my older friends and relatives are somewhat immune as their technical English just isn't good enough. I find the persons who call are mostly 25-35 year olds (I had one older acquaintance who taught highly technical subjects at university level who installed various cleaners that were clearly scams to me but I'll leave him out and focus on the telephone tech support scams.) Most of the cases we've managed to stop somehow. The one were I didn't manage to stop it in time or get the money back was actually a young accountant who got his personal checkings account emptied. One thing I've noticed is that several of the people who fall for it are surprisingly smart. In the last case I interviewed the victim for 20 minutes afterwards and what shook me was how she had no recollection of anything between the start of the call and when she was pulling out her second credit card. This suggests to me that the best scammers are kind of good with something NLP-line or something. (FTR: I do also pretend to be a victim everytime they call me both to annoy them for my own entertainment and to learn what they do so I have a fair idea of the first part of the scam.)