this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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I had a moment with one of these around 2010. Car insurance scam and these weren’t in the news all the time. Much lower pressure and I still had my card in my hand before I thought to ask what model car I had. He hung up.
I'm kinda convinced Dell sold my details to Indian scammers. I didn't have my laptop long before I started getting calls from "Dell Apple Microsoft tech support" about the computer sending them virus reports. I'm sure wanting me to let them remote into the machine, or run some other computer-based scam.
They had to have gotten the info from Dell; they knew the model number of the machine.
So I had someone who spoke with a thick accent wanting me to press Ctrl+Alt+R or whatever the run dialog hotkey in Windows is and run some commands. So I did exactly what he wanted me to do. And nothing happened. Because Linux Mint doesn't bind anything to Ctrl+Alt+R by default. Last thing I heard him say was "Listen, you fucking guy..."
I should have wasted more of his time, the parasite.
I had the complete opposite experience with a client where the scammer kept telling me to click on the Start menu even after I goaded him by telling him we were on a Mac. No ability to shift the scheme.
The scams are run by professional call centers. Sometimes as a side business of an otherwise normal call center. The people working there are call center workers. They have a script and they follow the script. They could have no knowledge of the underlying tech at all.
Next time when you're done with them, call them bhenchod. It means sisterfucker, very versatile swearing word in many Indian languages.
Why pay them the respect of insulting them in their own language?
Because it's unexpected?