If I have time when they call, I try to give them a little runaround - someday I should start recording them though I imagine that not many people would be interested in hearing it.
Sometimes the get mad at me when I string them along:
I never answer my phone. Voice-mail only. I feel so ignored. Fine with me…YMMV.
It is weird getting a Progessive USPS envelope in my mail-box touting they can save me $660US when I haven’t owned a vehicle in 20 years.
I think I should just mess with them, for the entertainment value alone.
Gullibility knows no bounds.
There’s a ton of ways a person can get sucked into something.
One I saw first hand was my mother who had this weird belief in the power of the government. They can’t be scammers since the government would have stopped it!
(And Fox News, etc. can’t lie since that’s against the law as well.)
I told an insurance salesman that we were A Hot Prospect, since we’d just been talking the night before about needing more insurance (“A TON more!”). I just HAD to get my wife on the other line.
Ran some water, shreiked and said “Oops, tried to hand her the phone while she’s in the shower; that didn’t work.” Guy said he’d wait, so I put the phone down and, as I cleaned the (empty) house, would occasionally yell things like “Honnnney, can you dry off faster? We’ve got to sign up with the nice man on the phone.”
The nice man on the phone eventually gave up.
I’m not sure why but phone scams have almost entirely stopped. But email scams are a different matter. In the past month I gotten maybe 100 of the sort: If you click here and take our customer survey, you will become eligible for a drawing for a prize of (somewhere between $1000 and $10,000). It all sounds almost legitimate. After all, the amount is not absurdly large and maybe there is only one chance in a million of winning. But they mostly purport to come from companies I have never done business with, although inevitably some will come from companies I have used. But the return addresses are usually from some totally mystifying country. Anyway, I’ll be damned if I am going to click on anything from such a source.
Another one, I’ve gotten a few times in the last month will start off by saying he is a thief who managed to install something on my computer that has turned on the camera and recorded me in some very compromising behavior and unless I send him $500 in bitcoins in the next 48 hours, he will broadcast to all my contacts.