You think that fraudulently ripping off old people and poor immigrants is at worst “unethical”? What exactly is your problem? This isn’t someone trying to sell an overpriced service or unnecessary product. It is theft, pure and simple.
edit: Oh, I see you registered here solely to justify scamming the vulnerable among the “rich, spoiled Western society”. Carry on then.
*reads title*
Wow, he wrote the program 28 times in a second? That’s some extreme coding prowess.
In my country telemarketing is rare, but I weed out unknown calls, anyway. Mercilessly.
About a month ago I relented that policy for a day. Because a close friend of our family was dying, someone who was basically a grandfather to my kid, and I had to assume that the number belonged to other relatives from his side.
And behold, it was some a-hole trying to sell me electricity.
Please tell me again that this was just a “petty annoyance”.
I registered here to object to calling people “scum”, when clearly there is an economic justice component to this problem. I don’t mean to justify anything. I was just taken aback to see rhetoric that I think is irresponsible and dangerous.
You are right. I apologize if my words caused you duress. The crimes of scammers, hurt many, in many ways. I am not excusing or justifying. I am only saying, that there is a global economic justice/racial component to this dynamic, and that in light of that I think it is irresponsible to call other people scum.
I’m one of those people who have poor conversational skills. I need to practice. Telemarketers are a resource I need to exploit.
Most smartphones can do that now.
This is not a debate about whether desperate people who are forced into theft are, in fact, scum. This is, however, a statement that people from whatever country who make a “living” stealing from naive old people, and from listening to the recording are proud of that fact, are most definitely human scum.
You could make the same argument for any criminal. Bernie Madoff? Why he has the mental condition of sociopathy. Jeffrey Dahmer? Mistreated by his parents. John Gotti? He was born into the Mafia, he didn’t know better.
The fact is, people become scammers for all different reasons. If you think that it is socially responsible to say they are all scum, well I suppose that’s on you. I chose to comment on it, because I was surprised to find that language/attitude here on boingboing. I would expect to see it on breitbart, 4chan, chatrooms, dredge report, etc. I am concerned by the evolving toxic rhetoric that has become commonplace. I believe that it is dangerous, and I do believe we have a personal responsibility to shape civil discourse. I don’t have any love for scammers. You are certainly entitled to your opinions on the matter, of course.
I tried shaming one of these scammers and mostly talked about tricking old people out of their money and hit a nerve with the guy. He started calling me back every 3 minutes for several hours and playing laughing sounds. My reaction was to laugh at him for getting under his skin and then he proceeds to start connecting me to other people they were calling so I would get somebody in the Midwest yelling at me. I would explain how these scammers work to them and so I would be cut off to start again. It really was interesting to see how much system access these call center guys had to the system at hand.
I think both these scammers and just telemarking in general is putting the nail in the coffin that is the telephone. It’s really sad but there is very little a person to control what these people can do to you except turn off your phone. I think the population in the next 20 years will probably just give up.
Hell, right now I would like an AI agent to take care of my calls for me.
False equivocation much? You, too, are entitled to your own opinions. I stand comfortably by my opinion of someone who uses fear and coercion to steal everything that an elderly, fixed income person owns, in some cases even causing them to lose their homes - that thief is truly the bottom of the barrel of humanity.
Fair point, although not just anyone can commit to a repository; sure, they
could submit a pull request, but I’d hope the main dev would be responsible
enough to double check the numbers before accepting.
Where I work we get calls from people saying they are from Minolta and that they are updating their records. Asking if I could look at the front of the machine and tell them the model number. Took me a while to realize they are actually just getting the model number so that someone can later call and try to sell us off brand toner. Now, I just hang up
I am sure that if I sat down and thought about it for several hours, I could probably come up with a behavior that exhibited a lower order of scumbaggery than IRS scammers.
So I will, provisionally, not reject your comment.
So if these scammers were white, and calling from a Pittsburgh suburb, you’d be okay with the language used here???
I agree that there is a difference between someone who is trying to sell me a legitimate product and someone who is trying to steal my cash or my identity.
But that doesn’t change the fact that if I could push a single button tomorrow to block both kinds of calls from my work phone, cell phone, and home phone forever, so that I would never again receive a single cold sales call for the rest of my life, I would jam that button down so hard and fast that I might fracture a finger.
It’s not an issue with the wonderful solution these guys have come up with.
The examples shown in the videos are both taken from scams where you have to call the scammers back - so the call centre needs a real, legit number to receive these calls on. And as mentioned in the first video, if they get fed up and change the number, it’s not difficult to search out more complaints on line (sites like whocallsme.com) and continue the salvo.
I still find it glorious that you can hear other operators in the background clearly receiving the same telling off 
