Spam Risk
I got our home phone number long before cell phones were a common thing to have. As things have evolved that phone number is part of my history and is good to use for things I don’t want ringing on my cellphone (like 99% of anything that requires a phone number for no good reason). So I have kept that phone number alive over the years. Most recently I moved it a few years back to an online service that charges a tiny amount of money per month to host it for me. I access it via a SIP client on my computer.
Because of the nature of the phone number it randomly rings. If I have time, I mess with whomever is calling. Most of the calls are the “your car warranty is about to expire” kind. Some of the calls are about non-existent credit cards. My favorite calls are the scammers. I record all calls that come into this phone number. In my state only one person needs to know that a call is being recorded and besides these scammers are all overseas so I really do not care about their laws.
Today I set a new record: a total of 1 hour of their time wasted.
The call comes in as normal. I string the guy along, I play dumb, I keep them thinking I am an easy target. After 40 minutes I tell him I have to hang up and could he call me back in an hour. To my surprise this idiot calls me back! So I decided to see if I could get him to let me connect to him by continuing to play dumb.
My plan is based on knowing that they have a handful of tools at their disposal, easiest of which is TeamViewer. So I play along until they get me on a TeamViewer but I never give them the real information on my end and I just ask for my partner ID. The idea is that with TeamViewer you can switch who is showing the screen after you make the initial connection. I know that I have but a precious few seconds of time if I manage to get them to give me their ID and password to make my plan happen.
So I have a dummy terminal set aside for all this. I quickly write out my set of commands so I can copy them to my clipboard and launch them as soon as I get connected. Sure enough they give me their ID and password. I am ready and I strike – paste the commands into a RUN window and let it rip. As I see the window pop up with the command prompt and the deletion of folders starts the guy starts to stutter and asks “What are you doing, sir?”
I keep playing dumb until my connection is terminated. All their files have been deleted. The scammer is furious. He starts to curse at me. I eventually start taunting him and cursing back at him. After a while, he hangs up.
Look, I know that they have cloned systems and they will be back up and running in no time at all. But this wasted an hour of their time and that is an hour they can’t use to scam someone else.
Story credit: Reddit / brainstomp