A guy talking to you from Kolkata, India isn’t going to be scared off by a threat to call the Poughkeepsie Police Department, or even direct violence.
The first time I heard that phrase was on some show about conmen who supposedly robbed from the rich or something.
He said it to his friend at the table they were at. Then at the end of their conversation, he got up, went to the bar, and pointed at another table, and said that they would pay their tab. He’d had some previous brief conversation with them, so when he waved at them, they waved back.
I struggled to see who it was who got scammed that was being dishonest.
I recently listened to a podcast (Planet Money?) where one of the hosts was initially taken in by a scammer. Some scammers are pretty convincing.
There may be a bit more that can be done with a number that they ask me to call than the obviously spoofed number that they called from.
At the very least, since it was a local number, maybe it could be intercepted to prevent anyone else from falling for the scam.
As far as the violence, I wasn’t trying to “scare” him, obviously. I was just trying to get him to stop calling, and I figured that maybe if he thought that I was willing to murder a utility worker to keep them from turning off my power, then this was a dead end for him.
The “you can’t cheat an honest man” thing specifically refers to a specific kind of con. One is the kind where the scammer finds a wallet full of cash or a fake passed out drunk with an expensive watch (as show in The Sting or Better Call Saul). The mark is supposedly helping with the ripoff and ends up getting screwed. There are so many other ones where the scammer takes advantage of the mark’s kindness, naivete or vulnerability.
If the number showed as local it was almost sure to be spoofed, which means they toss it and spoof another “local” number.
Con artists don’t give a flying fuck about the possibility of you attacking local utility workers.
Thank you, yes. The sooner this “Can’t cheat an honest man” crap dies out, the better.
The number that they were supposedly calling from was actually the number of my electric utility.
However, that’s not what I was talking about. I was talking about the number they told me to call. Harder to spoof that.
Which wasn’t the point. The point would have been to get him to stop repeatedly calling me. If he knows that I am willing to murder rather than pay up, then I’m not much of a mark.
Like he really would have believed that you’d kill someone let alone give a shit about some random person in the US. If you want them to go away, hang up as soon as possible.
Doesn’t matter if he believes me, only matters if he stops thinking that I’m going to fall for his scam.
And as I said, this is something that crossed my mind, not something that I actually did.
As far as whether someone would murder over having their utilities turned off, it’s not like it’s without precedent.
Tried that, and he just kept calling back.
My lated father was scammed by “Microsoft” into letting them have access to his computer, and signing up for some repeating credit card charges. I yelled “YOU DID WHAT???” when he told me he allowed them remote access to his machine. This was a guy whose title was “Chief Computer Scientist” in the 80’s.
I also have a friend who lost $4K to scammers pretending to be his grandson in a Mexican jail.
The first time the power company called, warning of impending electrical shut-off and offering to allow payment by credit card, my receptionist almost used her own personal card to pay. I walked by and saw her rooting through her purse and taking out a credit card. I stopped her and hung up the phone. She was angry, because we only had an hour before the power would be cut.
We’ve gotten the call two times since then.
Scammers don’t have to reach out directly to someone so that they can scam them – they can set things up so that the victim reaches out to them.
My sister-in-law’s emailed was hacked so that everyone on her contact list got an email purporting to be from her with a link to click. Once she and my brother were told by me and others this had happened, my brother wanted to do something about it. (This was not the first time one of their email addresses had been hacked.)
One of their sons works in IT security. He was due to fly out to visit them in a few days anyway, and told his mother to not use her computer until he got there when he’d straighten it all out.
Well, my brother didn’t want to wait so he googled for some service to help them. He found one (I think the first hit on the list) that he thought checked out okay and went ahead and hired them.
When my nephew got there, they told him that the service had determined that the hackers had gotten access to bank accounts. In order to stop the hackers, the service needed access to those accounts, which they gave them. The first step in the scam by the service was to transfer a couple of hundred dollars out of my brother’s checking account - but, not to worry, they’d deposit the money back the next day. My nephew rolled his eyes and tried to tell them they were being scammed.
I’m not sure what the scammers’ actual plan was, but the next day there was a transfer of the money back into their checking account. “See?” my brother told my nephew. “I told you I know what I’m doing. I hired a good firm and they are resolving all this for us.”
Nephew spent two minutes researching to determine that the money that was transferred into my brother’s checking account that was supposedly returned by the “security” firm actually came from my brother’s own savings account.
I suspect this maneuver was designed to gain my brother’s trust so that they could then take him for big bucks.
An older relative in my family got one like that. She was visiting my parents one day and asked if I could take a look at her computer some day. I asked what the problem was and she went into a spiel about Time Warner Cable calling and now her computer is locked and she doesn’t understand why and she has to pay them $600 to get it unlocked etc etc etc. At some point her husband heard it and hung up on the person.
So, she clearly has some ransomware on her computer and possibly a remote desktop software. The ONLY thing she uses the computer for is emailing people. That’s it. My suggestion was that she should just throw it out and get a new one. That was my suggestion because I didn’t want to drive 45 minutes each way, to her house and back, to spend half a day staring at her computer trying to remove ransomware or formatting it and getting Windows back.
I never did go out and fix it, I don’t know whatever became of that computer, but despite myself, her husband and her daughter all trying to explain to her that it was a scam, she literally went to her grave believing we were wrong and that TWC locked her out of her computer.
And the TWC thing was the key to it all. She simply couldn’t wrap her head around how these ‘scammers’ knew she had TWC. Despite all of us explaining it to her, it wasn’t sinking in.
A lot of the potentially susceptible think it could never happen to them.
I go on the assumption that given the right circumstances/stress/inattention I could be vulnerable, so I try to keep my skepticism and suspicion levels up as much as possible in any interaction that involves money and/or personal information.
Does anyone still do the pigeon drop? There’s a classic example of “you can’t cheat an honest man”.
I’ve found that accusing him of doing nasty things with his mother works well. It is both legal and it really pisses them off.
Worked well for me when the Windows company called.
I usually just tell them that their mother would be very disappointed in them.
Combine the two approaches and tell him his mother is very disappointed with his sexual adequacy.
That almost happened to someone I know, but in the states. It was a call from someone pretending to be his niece who was in dutch with the law for drunk driving. Also in on it was a guy who was supposed to be her boyfriend and said they needed 2000 dollars. When he told her she didn’t sound like his niece she said she was speaking that way because of an injury sustained in the vehicle accident. The names and the places were believable but when he pressed for further details they balked, thankfully preventing the scam from working.
From what I’ve come to learn, this one seems to be a known type scam.
There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING the recipient of these calls can do to discourage the scammers. Neither can law enforcement; they don’t have the resources or jurisdiction to pursue the scammers. Only the telecommunication companies are is a position to stop them and I’m astounded they haven’t developed the tech yet to do it.