Maybe I should feel sorry for the folks who work in phone bank boiler rooms. I suspect many are just trying to eke out a living in these hard times, but I find myself more angry than sympathetic.
The robo calls you can hang up on but you can't make them stop coming. The ones with a live person on the other end you have to deal with if you want to ask them to stop calling, though I wonder how well that works.
Since I'm here a lot I get a lot of them.
Today I got one of the social engineering type. Supposedly my computer was sending messages that it was in some kind of distress and this firm (vaguely named "System Solutions") was calling to help me out. I could not get a name or a supervisor's name nor could I get a clear explanation of what the inquiry was about. The caller asserted that he had recently been in Redmond and in other ways implied that he was associated with Microsoft.
He tried to sound reasonable and when he began to ask me questions about my computer I asked if "my computer is sending you messages why don't you know all of this already?" He just had to check some things. Would I turn on my computer and check some things for him? Yeah right. I should have asked for his phone number and told him I'd call back, but I was too annoyed. A little web research on "System Solutions" and "scam" turned up this:
"A new scam has been making the rounds recently – scammers calling through the phone and posing as people from Microsoft, scaring victims into paying for bogus services and stealing their credit information. These fraudsters can be very persistent – so it's important to always be alert and informed."
It's a fearful time. Times like this and these people seem to crawl out of the woodwork. One of the damn robo calls was offering "to help with [my] IRS debt." Scare tactics all the way. You have an infected computer. You owe the IRS. And on and on.
It's enough to make me more of a curmudgeon than I already am.
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