Windows Support Call: The Quickening

[Geek King]

Short, but funny from tonight:

Caller: Hello? I am Aiden from Windows Support Center calling about your computer?

Me: Of course you are.

Caller: <click!>

Aw, Scammer doesn't want to play.

[MadMike]

Ah, the Microsoft Scammers, or as they often call themselves, "Windows", despite the fact that Windows is a product and not a company.

My son loves to play with those scammers. A couple of months ago, one called his great aunt, who doesn't know about computers, but was smart enough to realize that something was fishy. She said she wanted to talk to her nephew (my son) first, and call them back after she talked to him. Surprisingly, they gave her a callback number, which I'm sure they came to regret later.

We were on our way back from a physical therapy appointment (some of you may know that my son broke his ankle in two places back in October), and he decided to call them back and have some fun. He was nice enough to put it on speakerphone so I could enjoy it too. He played dumb, acting like he knew nothing about computers, and repeatedly thanked the guy for being there to help him out. He had the scammer thinking he had 27 computers, running all different versions of Windows, and then asked if the old Windows 95 machine he had in his closet was also infected. And then to further tease them, he told them that he really needed to get this fixed, because some of those machines were business machines, and had customers' credit card numbers and personal information stored on them.

The scammer asked him if these computers all belonged to him, and he replied, "Yeah, they're mine, I can do whatever I want with them! I can have sex with them, I can throw them out the window, I can stick my dick in the floppy drive!" I had to stifle a laugh at this point to keep from blowing the whole thing. But then he had to end the game, because he had asked me to take him to McDonald's before he made the call, and we were just pulling up to the drive-thru. So he told them that his power had suddenly gone out, and asked them to call him back in 20 minutes. They never did.

A couple weeks later, one called his house while he was sleeping. He works weird hours, and sleeps a lot during the day, so he was tired and not really in the mood to go to the same lengths to toy with them like he did the last ones. Then they told him his computer was infected, he told them, "Hold on." Then he rattled a bunch of stuff in his house around, picked up the phone and said, "Thank you so much for letting me know! I threw the computer out the window! I'm going to go to Best Buy later and get a new one!" They kept stammering about how they could fix it, and told him to just plug the computer back in, and they could help him. But he told them, "No, I am not taking any chances! I am not bringing that infected thing back into my house! Thank you so much for warning me! Thank you so much! Goodbye!"

A couple weeks after that, he came here on a night I was making enchiladas for dinner. He had nothing to do and he was feeling a little bored, so he decided to call the number he had for the first scammer to see if it still worked, and it did. This time he recorded the whole thing. I have it on my computer, and thought about putting it up on Youtube or something, but I'd have to turn it into a video file somehow. I've seen another guy who also plays with scammers who posts them online, and it looks like he converted them to a video with text that comes up and explains what's going on. I've also seen where people just add a still picture, but I have no idea how to go about doing either of those things. My son told me you can do it with Movie Maker, but I'll be damned if I can figure it out. Towards the end of the call, my son started saying some things to them that weren't exactly politically correct. He's not a racist or bigot in any way, but he was just saying those things to piss them off. His grandparents on his mother's side, however, are a bit racist, and I'm very proud of him for not buying into that bullshit.

Anyway, he once again played the part of someone who knew nothing about computers, and thanked them for being there to help him, and expressed concern that the virus might spread to his other appliance, such as his toaster. I'm sure the scammer was thinking, "This guy is really stupid! I'm going to take him for everything!" He proceeded to waste their time by pretending not to understand what they were telling him to do, having them spell everything out phonetically, and finally having to go to a "meeting", and putting his "assistant" on the phone, who was just as clueless as my son was pretending to be, and barely speaking English.

Then my son resumed his originally personality, and went to the site they told him to go to, and proceeded to read off everything on the screen, and asking, "What do I do now?" When they told him to download the file, he pretended to get an error message, and then informed them he was running Linux. At this point they told him to "Please hold", and then hung up on him.

He called them back and told them that he had other machines running Windows, and also a Mac, and got them going again. They went back and forth several more times, with my son still pretending to be clueless, and you could hear that the scammer was starting to get frustrated. At one point, the scammer gave a price to "fix" everything, and my son yelled into the phone, "HOLY SHIT, THAT'S A LOT OF MONEY!" I think that's where the whole thing started to go south. They told him that if he didn't have money, they couldn't help him and hung up on him again.

He called them back and told them he had the money, and then got them going again by asking if that price was per machine or for all of his machines, but then he annoyed them by asking, "Who was that (politically incorrect language I mentioned above) that kept hanging up on me? He was really starting to piss me off!" After that, the scammer really started to lose it, and told him not to call back again. So my son did just that. This time the guy was trying to tell him he had the wrong number, despite the fact you could hear other people in his group talking on the phone trying to scam other people. At the end of the whole adventure, my son went off on them, telling them he knew what they were trying to do, and threatening to "go over there and fuck them sideways."

He messed with them for a good 45 minutes.

[Teefies2]

Hooray for your son!

I know these people are, for the most part, doing their job .... but gawldangit! These scams only work because people fall for them. In a perfect world, everyone would know enough NOT to fall for these!

Now, get offa mah lawn!

[Ted_The_IT_Guy]

MadMike, your son's ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to his newsletter.

I admire his committment to the bit - I would have lost it long before the best payoffs.

I've always wanted to pretend that I was in some sort of missle silo and was a gullible military person if I got one of those calls...

[MoonCat]

these people are, for the most part, doing their job

These people are pulling a scam to steal your money, and well aware of it. There's a difference.

Anyone who can bullshit them for 45 minutes is at least keeping them from stealing someone else's money for that period of time. It's all good.

[TopEndDave]

I have had two calls from scammers pretending to be from Telstra, who once had the monopoly on telecoms in Australia. They still control a large chuck of the phone networks and are a large ISP.

The calls go like this:

Scammer: "I am <some made up name> from the technical department of Telstra"
Me: "Yes"
S: "I regret to inform you that we have to terminate your Internet and email for six months"
Me: "What? Why?"
S: "Your computer is infected and is causing a problem with the Telstra Internet Server/Telstra IP numbers."

I don't use Telstra as my ISP but I do for phone services. The first call was that my computer was overloading the Telstra Internet server When I expressed my doubt the caller tried to convince me that he was not a scammer and suffers from the Microsoft scammer calls. His next step was to get me to open up event viewer and state that all the events were the result of a virus. I decided to stop playing the game at that point and ended the call.

The second call was about my computer interfering with a Telstra IP number. That scammer hung up when I asked the question "How can my computer that gets its IP number from my ISP affect a Telstra IP number."