WTC causing brain cell loss

The BBQ Pit
1

I got this idiot calling me at work (I do tech support) because he got spam from one of our customers. The email was selling some kind of trinkets, and the proceeds were to go to WTC-related charities. This guy did a whois on the domain to see who sent it and what ISP hosted it. The domain registration information had a fake address. This is very common, a lot of webmasters do this to keep from getting harrassed by every weirdo who knows how to go into a shell or DOS and type the command.

Well, this guy decided that, since the information was false, the guy who sent the email MUST be scamming people, and was intending to commit credit card fraud. I explained that he should forward the email, with full headers, to our abuse department and they would look into it. He said that he already did that but it takes weeks for them to look at it (not true) and he needed to speak to our network operations center so he could get them to pull the plug on our customer.

I told him I could not transfer the call to the NOC (I’m not even allowed to contact them myself) and that he had to go through the proper channels, which he already did. He starts yelling at me saying ‘You may not care about what happened to the WTC but the media does and I’m going to let them know that you are allowing this scam to happen and refuse to do anything about it’. I explained that I wasn’t refusing to help, I just couldn’t do anything about this, this needs to be handled by our abuse department. He screamed and ranted at me a while longer and asked to speak to my supervisor, who can’t take calls that don’t have associated case numbers, and we can only generate cases for our customers (the database requires an account number). He ended the call telling me I better sell any stock I have in my company because he was going to destroy it.

This is totally ridiculous. Even if one of our customers WAS scamming people we aren’t responsible for it - we don’t monitor everybodies communications, we respond when we are alerted to this kind of stuff and he ALREADY ALERTED US.

Idiot.

2

Ugh. There’s always at least one, isn’t there?

Don’t let it ruin your day. He’s probably doing this to several people, has been, and his relatives and friends (if he has any) think he’s a jerk, too.

3

I do tech support for an ISP as well and we get calls like that all the time. I do billing as well and we get it mostly in billing where they are talking about how they are gonna shut us down. If I could tell you which ISP I worked for you’d laugh even harder.

Erek

4

That sucks.

On a related topic to your thread title (I know it’sd a hijack anyway), my friend told me this story about her teacher.

This woman, a university teacher, mispelled two words in a class, including “polotical” instead of “political”. When called on it, she replied “Well, this WTC thing is really having an effect on all of us, isnt it.”

Yep. You can’t spell 'cause of terrorists. Nice try, lady.

5

While the terrorists probably didn’t take away her ability to spell, the whole deal is kinda stressful. I know I’m spending a significant amount of time being more distracted than usual. Not that I can ever spell, but some things I can do I’m screwing up because I’m not paying attention to them. Like counting change at work. You know, the simple stuff that doesn’t usually take much focus at all.