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Sitting at home and my land line phone rings. This is very unusual, the main reason I have
this line is to provide me with the physical connection needed for my internet. As for
the phone number, I only use it when filling out forms which require a number in a land
line style format. So when it does ring I'm suspicious, and the first thing I do when
I answer is to say nothing but listen for a few seconds. It's partly to put the caller
off-balance as this is not the response they're expecting, it's partly to give me a chance
to listen to to any noises such as background call centre chat.
So I answer this call and listen and hear so many pops, crackles and hisses, this is
not even a poor quality 'standard' land line call but something a bit different. After
a few second the caller says hello and asks for me by name. The voice is only just audible
above this background noise and his style of grammar, use of English is to put it mildly,
a little odd. The accent makes me think of someone of Pakistan or perhaps Indian background.
He then announces that he is calling from the Microsoft Support Centre and they've detected
that my computer has a virus on it. Oh, it must be scam time!
For each question he asks or statement he makes I give an uncertain or incomplete answer
such as just saying 'yes' when a more natural response would be a full sentence, or when
he tells me that I'm sitting in front of my computer I correct him to say that I am sitting
beside my computer (which is technically correct; my monitors are in front of me but the machine
is off to one side, beside me). This sort of thing seem to get him rather annoyed and
he keeps on repeating he is calling from the Microsoft Support Centre and I keep on giving
slightly ambigious or incomplete answers. As this continues I can hear him getting more
and more exasperated and I'm having more and more fun.
It must be about after nearly 10 minutes (and I've managed to draw things out such that
we've not yet even got to the stage of me looking at the files on my computer) he gets
so irritated he hangs up. I do have an old lap-top and I think I must
do a Windows re-install on this and keep it handy so that if I get this again I have a
machine I'm happy to play with. The trick will be to try and get him to directly access
my machine (rather than me downloading any strange 'virus cleaning' software) so that
I can get his IP address and pass it on to relevant authorities.
It was in its own way an interesting session, I can understand how the gullible, non-computer
literate people could get tricked. He was quite persuasive in his own way of insisting
that he was from Microsoft, however he had a wasted 10 minutes with me.