Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/14/tech-support-scammer-actually.html
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and may never offer tech support again
That’s a lot of effort just to be able to tell your parents that no, you can’t help them fix their computers.
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When my wife gets those calls, she laughs and says “You don’t really expect me to fall for that shit, do you?” then she tells them to fuck off and hangs up.
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I used to do that; now I string them along and waste as much of their time, patience and brainpower as possible.
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I need to rewatch some of the youtube videos. They show how you can hijack the scammers computer and hide it from them so after stringing them along about for a bit you syskey their machine.
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Exhibit A as to why we have so many junk telephone calls.
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A bottom feeder like this conned some money out of my mother years ago and they still call. When I’m visiting and get to pick up the line on what she suspects is a call from them I like to play all mock concerned and lead them down the garden path until I start laughing at them for not being competent enough to work a realistic sounding scam (when I ask them to double check it’s “my” IP they usually say it’s coming from 192.168.1.1!). It usually ends with them calling me ridiculous “bad names” in broken English that only make me laugh harder.
As for my mother, she got the original charge reversed and now knows just to hang up.
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Nicole “Call Flooder” Mayhem is my hero.
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From the article:
Parmit Singh Brar … may never offer tech support again.
Let me make the prediction now: in not more than 5 years time, he will be found to have been running either the exact same scam, or some other scam that involves bilking people by phone.
I don’t know what it is about spammers and scammers, but they Do Not Change. They’re very inventive when it comes to making up ways to rip people off, but they don’t seem to be able to conceive of any business plan that doesn’t involve scamming someone.
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The call is coming from 127.0.0.1!
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Yeah. Ordinarily I’d let my 8th amendment scruples get in the way; but spammers aren’t people.
Does anybody have the actual link to the article? I’m having trouble finding it on the Googles.
I get these calls all the time. I like to keep them on the phone for as long as I can. I’m retired and have nothing else to do 
They always hang up on me when we get to the point where I tell them I use my son’s old computer to play solitaire and I don’t have “the internet”. Hilarity ensues.
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Unfortunately, I’ve had some recently that hang up as soon as I ask for a phone number where I can get back to them.
This is really on the phone companies for allowing spoofed numbers, and not allowing the receiving person to see that it is spoofed. They need to give you an option to block any call for which you can’t reach the caller by calling the number you see.
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this a thousand times.
there used to be things like *69 to return a call. there’s literally no reason - save profit and lack of meaningful choice between providers - there isn’t a button that would block a number and mark it as spam.
as of late i’ve been getting calls almost everyday from various numbers where no one is on the line if i answer.
either an ai somewhere is doing a bad job, or someone is using that call to spoof another connection.
it’s bad enough i just ignore my phone when it rings. everyone i know texts anyway.
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Such an easy thing to do in this day and age.
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I think there’s an argument to be made that he never provided tech support in the first place.
Yeah, it’s like when an underage kid without a licence is caught joyriding and gets banned from driving.
Sounds like something that could be fixed with a California ballot initiative, since elected officials everywhere in the US are too corrupt to side with the people against the telecom monopolies.
I do that, but it quickly fails when their script tells me to locate the Windows start key on the old keyboard I use on my Linux system. “No, there is no key between Ctrl and Alt.” Click.
They don’t even hit the Linux. How sad is that?
