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For a while I grew quite fond of wasting phone scammers time. I’d pick up, talk suuuuuuper slowly— like Emo Phillips speed at one syllable every one or two seco
by chefandy 4y ago
For a while I grew quite fond of wasting phone scammers time. I’d pick up, talk suuuuuuper slowly— like Emo Phillips speed at one syllable every one or two seconds— interrupt with irrelevant questions or anecdotes, and overall just see how long I could keep them on the phone without giving them any information. The best strategy I found was telling them that, yes indeed I did remember owing the IRS or whoever money and I could pay them however and insisting that first they needed to take down my new email address… I’d just start spelling random words incredibly slowly, say I messed up and start over, ask if they needed my checking account number to keep them engaged and then start spelling my email address again. They prey on intellectually disabled folks so pantomiming a stereotypical version of that wastes a ton of time while keeping their interest. Got boring after a while but I got pretty good at it.
- gonehome 4y agoI thought this was pretty great: https://youtu.be/xsLJZyih3Ac&t=22m23s https://youtu.be/xsLJZyih3Ac&t=22m23s My favorite part is when the guy uses the scammers real name and she panics.
- sowbug 4y agoIn case you haven't seen it, someone automated this: https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ https://jollyrogertelephone.com/
- nwiswell 4y agoI didn't know I wanted this service until now. $2/mo? Hell yeah. The sticking point, for me, is that I have to merge the call every time. Ugh. I want it to prompt me whether I want to blackhole a call like the Pixel Google Assistant, but instead of politely screening just torment the asshole. For a service like that, I could imagine paying substantially more, possibly even for a premium service where the call would get transferred to a human tormentor.
- djbusby 4y agoEasy to build on Twilio. Then port your tainted number in, give a new number to the in-group. But the Twilio "clean call" plugins don't work. So, play the funny loop and offer a bypass for known-numbers.
- guilherme-puida 4y agoBlocked in Brazil for some reason.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoSlovenia too :) > Block reason: Access from your Country was disabled by the administrator.
- metadat 4y agoBrazil is, unfortunately, a known scam source origin country.
- utrack 4y agoTurkey as well. And Poland, even.
- rand0mx1 4y agoeven Papua new Guinea
- chefandy 4y agoI wonder if these countries have some technical difference in their billing systems— like you could merge them into the call from a toll number and reverse charge them or something.
- ivarv 4y agoanother automated scam trolling service called lenny - https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/ https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/ Listening to some of these makes me laugh so hard my eyes start to water. The script eventually loops and some scammers don't catch on despite being implausibly being interrupted by a flock of ducks.
- jedberg 4y agoI did that once while I was driving for an hour. They had already interrupted my podcast with the call and I didn't have anything better to do, so I engaged. They eventually caught me when I didn't give the same fake SSN twice.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agocaught you, heh
- WHA8m 4y agoWhat's the longest time you kept them occupied?
- 01acheru 4y agoNot OP but once a spammer called me when some long stuff had just started building and I was just sitting there watching the logs, fixing some random stuff on the fly, rebuilding and so on. I stayed with them on the phone for something like 40 minutes, after a while they started getting more "violent" until they abruptly hung up when it was crystal clear I was pranking them.
- chefandy 4y agoAbout half an hour. Earlier I had seen a video on YouTube of someone just driving through a city I was considering moving to— just car sounds. So I told the guy to stay on the line while I was I was driving to Walmart to buy gift certificates because it was only a 3 or 4 minute drive and kept being like "oh damnit... I took another wrong turn" every now and then. Eventually he heard me typing and hung up.
- nlnn 4y agoI've had a lot of fun doing this with the "did you have an accident that wasn't your fault?" spam callers. I always try to come up with a plausible accident that slowly descends into something, well, not so plausible. My recent favourite has been admitting that I'd had an accident because my dog was driving my car at the time (he was begging me to, and I didn't want him growling all the way home, and he'd been such a good boy the whole trip so he deserved it). Another is where I talk about an accident and a neck injury I'd received, until finally explaining that I'd been decapitated in the accident, and that it was causing problems with work, and how excited I was to finally get some compensation.
- notRobot 4y agoLmao, those are hilarious!
- BuildTheRobots 4y agoI went through a phase where I was getting 4 or 5 phone calls per day, mostly companies doing strange surveys. I used to amuse myself by using a d20 and googling for top 20 manufacturers in different fields. What car do I drive? Pick from a list of phone manufacturers and so on. Spent the whole time sounding interested, friendly, and only occasionally pointing out I need to find my dice. The calls started drying up pretty quickly.
- NylaTheWolf 4y agoYou might enjoy Kitboga's videos![0] His channel is basically him messing with scammers and going on tangents. I really enjoyed his collab with CallMeKevin.[1] There was also one video where he ended up calling a second scammer for "tech support", pitted them against each other, and made them get into a literal rap battle with each other.[2] [0] https://youtube.com/c/KitbogaShow https://youtube.com/c/KitbogaShow [1] https://youtu.be/dshtGUi3gto https://youtu.be/dshtGUi3gto [2] https://youtu.be/9HzuCXXC8Sg https://youtu.be/9HzuCXXC8Sg