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Troling scammers, good idea?

Discussion in 'Whatnots' started by SlickRCBD, Jun 23, 2022.

  1. SlickRCBD Gems: 29/31
    Latest gem: Glittering Beljuril


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    I've been getting a lot of illegal robocalls from scammers.
    However, today I had one that was an obvious scammer claiming to be from "AT&T your Internet provider". I haven't had AT&T as an ISP since Comcast bought AT&T broadband back in 2002. I don't recall the exact wording of what the recording said, and I didn't listen to the whole thing, but it was utterly ridiculous to somebody with a Network+ and MCSA certification.
    Something about my internet being cut off because my DSL modem is sending spam (I don't have DSL) and that I need to pay for something. It just made no sense to a tech.

    Anyways, I've been told you should just hang up on these calls, but would it have been a bad idea to "press 1" and troll the obvious scammer? Maybe even set up a virtual machine to sandbox them if necessary?

    If it had been a live person I would definitely have trolled them, but I was hesitant to "press 1" and hung up.

    If it makes any difference, I'm in the Chicago suburbs, Illinois, USA.
    Given that all the robocalls spoof the caller ID (and they have to be spoofing because when I get the same robocall it's always a different number purporting to be in my area code and usually my prefix, and once or twice I've recognized the number as belonging to an unrelated business or a neighbor, although a few times it's been my own number), I have no idea where they are.

    I did troll a scammer once before a few years back. Somebody called claiming to be from Microsoft when I was working on updating my certifications to Win10 and had just created a Virtual Machine with the "undo disk" in Virtual PC turned on. I trolled him by being the most annoying idiot user from hell. I did everything I've ever had a user do when I was doing tech support that I found annoying, and pretended to make dumb mistakes just to aggravate him. I was a composite of all the worst users.
    Such as accidentally hitting the wrong button, or canceling something so he'd have to start all over with his directions, and "forgetting" whether to use the left or right mouse button all the time. Also not knowing the correct terms for anything, and "forgetting" any terms he hadn't used in the last couple minutes so he had to explain again. Not to mention using the wrong terms for things.
    Of course, when it was finally time to enter my credit card number, I told him "Oh, but I lost my wallet yesterday, and the new card hasn't arrived yet." When he mentioned debit cards, same story.
    Of course I was lying, but I was trolling the scammer and yanking his chain and trying to make him miserable for shits and giggles.
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2022
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