Someone just tried to scam me - they found my LinkedIn profile and asked if they could send me information about a women’s leadership conference, conducted over Zoom, that they thought I might be interested in. I thought it was a little off, since they didn’t include a website, but sure - I answered and said they could send info.
The next email included a website and it was pretty clear it was a scam. A little bit of attention to detail and some minimal research showed it was a variation on what’s mentioned here (fake business summits).
Okay, scams happen constantly and we should all be careful consumers. Phishing attempts/malware/scams do make it through spam filters from time to time and I have the sense to delete them without giving them another thought.
So I’m not sure why this one annoys me so much. It might have been the two-step process, where I actually wrote back to a person, then heard an individual response. It made me want to write a contemptuous note back to the same address, pointing out how obvious it is that it’s a scam.
But there is no point in doing that, and no point in getting annoyed. The best approach is just to ignore and delete the email and get on with my life. Which I am doing.
Send them something in a large font, saying you’ve been trying to contact them about their vehicle’s extended warranty. Maybe it’ll get the point across?
I used to laugh at the “this is Microsoft on the phone, we are here to help you” scammers until they scammed my MIL and we had to wipe her computer and change her credit cards. Now, I ask them, “does your mother know your are cheating vulnerable people for a living?” (They curse me and hang up when I say that.)
You are pissed because they got you to ask for information. That makes it more personal.
I try to be as verbally abusive as possible to scammers and spammers. I always Press 1 or whatever it takes to speak to a real person and then I let the verbal abuse fly.
It seems to work, to some degree. I get a lot fewer spam calls than my friends do.
My goal isn’t even to cut down on the calls i get. Mine is to shame the employees, and to do what i can to increase employee turnover and make the operation less lucrative for whoever is in charge.
Given that this particular scam attempt is via email, I can’t be verbally abusive or accusatory; I’d have to write back an email. Which I could do, but I’m not sure why I should.
On the other hand, looking at the comments in the link I shared, it appears that this is a fairly well-organized scam and they fight back, trying to convince you that they’re legit. (It’s the same folks who tried to con me; they don’t cover their tracks particularly well.) So maybe I could waste their time a little by engaging them? I dunno.
Here’s what I did: I answered with a polite email saying “thanks for the link; on reflection, it doesn’t seem useful to us.”
So, I’m playing dumb - not letting them know I realize it’s a scam, but expressing no interest. If they want to engage, I will let them try to convince me for as long as they want.
I’ll probably never hear from them again, but it will be entertaining if I do.
One day when I was bored and yet another “Microsoft Windows” person called, I started yelling at them and telling them they’d better hurry back and fix the sh*tty windows they’d installed that was already leaking. They didn’t hang up immediately. I guess they thought if I was stupid enough to buy bad windows, I might buy their services. I had my wife and a friend rolling before I was cut off.