New telephone scam?

[Bird]

A newspaper article this morning tells of a scam I hadn't yet heard about. Some woman in Oregon is calling people, usually the elderly, to get them to renew their newspaper or magazine subscription. Apparently she's actually renewing some and paying for them, but charging folks a great deal more than if they'd just called the publisher themselves. But in other cases, she's collecting the money and not even paying for the renewal.

 

[Tig]

The niece/nephew/grandchild in jail in a ugly one. On at least two occasions my wife has called police to prevent seniors from wiring bail money for dubious reasons. The police are real good with this. They not only alert police at the other end of the wire transfer, they track down the relative in question and have them talk to the kind relative wiring the money.

 

[QRTRHRS]

My wife is deaf and though her coclear implant helps, she cannot use the phone and I don't use it much either. The only reason we keep the land line is in case of an emergency and our cell coverage is not the best.

Even though we were on the so called do not call registry, we were getting more and more calls. I recently re-registered and after a month, it seems to have helped as the calls have about stopped. I am almost never near the phone and when I am, I would never pick up without looking at the caller ID anyway. Though I would not waste my time by picking up and taking issue with someone, I did come close recently. I was getting calls from some Keystone College (in PA of course) at ten o'clock on Sunday nights? I mean, how ignorant is that? Anyway, that was what prompted me to re-register and as I said, it seems to be helping.

 

[Danny C]

I got a call from someone with a foreign accent claiming to be from Microsoft. It seems my computer is somehow responsible for some kind of mischief. Before he got into the details, my temper got the best of me and I responded with an impolite remark and hung up. This is the second time this has happened. The first time was several months ago. The phone number on the caller id said the call came from some small rural network in the northern midwest. The second call was last night. The caller id number was an obvious fake--234567890. Before he got to any details I hung up again. Now I wish I had listened long enough to learn what was going on. Has this happened to anyone else?

It is a scam. When you got your computer, you did not have to register with Microsoft, so how would Microsoft then get your name and phone number? They use Microsoft because like 70% of all computers run some variant of Windows.

They want access to your computer, then wish to use that access to get ot your personal information and even monitor your web traffic including online banking, email and such.

I've had fun with them many times. I go along, pretending to follow their instructions, asking questions, playing dumb and when they get to the end and ask what the screen says, I normally say something of the funny and vulgar category. Oh, the fun!

 

[dmccarty]

A newspaper article this morning tells of a scam I hadn't yet heard about. Some woman in Oregon is calling people, usually the elderly, to get them to renew their newspaper or magazine subscription. Apparently she's actually renewing some and paying for them, but charging folks a great deal more than if they'd just called the publisher themselves. But in other cases, she's collecting the money and not even paying for the renewal.

One of the magazines I used to get had a company mailing out new subscription requests that were about twice the real cost. The "company" would pay the subscription and keep the difference. The magazine would warn against this frequently but this is certainly something that many people would not notice.

When spammers would call my uncle he would talk to them for a bit and then put down the phone. Every once in awhile he might pick up the phone and give them a "a huh" to keep them talking. :thumbsup::laughing::laughing::laughing: He figured anything he could do to waste there time kept the idiots from bothering someone else. :thumbsup:

Decades ago a group of us from work went out to eat lunch. We were waiting outside to get a table and a nearby pay phone rang. I picked up the phone and it was a spammer. :shocked: Just then we were told our table was ready so I gave the guy a couple "A huhs" and went inside to eat lunch. :laughing::laughing::laughing: I bet he talked for at five minutes before he figured it out. I put the phone back on the hook when we left. :laughing:

Later,
Dan