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Comment by happy-go-lucky | Hacker News Reader

Copy-pasting one of the replies from the page:

Reminds me of something my mom did a few weeks ago. She got a scam call from some guy saying he was with Microsoft and he detected a virus on her computer. (First clue it was a scam? They have an iMac. Why would Microsoft be calling?)

My mom started playing dumb and saying, “You mean my Commodore has a virus?”

“What?”

“Yes! I have a Commodore 64!”

“Uh..Do you have Windows?”

“Well, of course! I can look through them and see the birds outside! My cats LOVE my windows...But I don’t let them up by my computer after someone told me that computers have mice.”

“Uhm...Ma’am...Is there someone else there?”

“Nope! Just me, my 12 cats, and my 4 dogs!”

The guy hung up on her at that point. :)

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Forward all scam calls to Lenny: https://www.youtube.com/user/ToaoDotNet/videos

Thank you, Thank you! I'd never heard of this before.

That's freaking awesome!

The latest one goes on for more than an hour, and he actually has the telemarketer reminiscing facts he told him about his third eldest daughter Laurissa, right before a duck attacks! The poor guy's starting to sound very tired, but that's only 7 and a half minutes into the hour-long phone call! [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/D-RAlSGWQlI?t=7m32s

Good on your mom. I am always curious about these scam call centers. How do they staff up? Do they place an ad in the paper? Are the people who make these calls normal folks like you or I who wake up in the morning, commute to the office, sit in a cubicle and make these calls?

It doesn't seem all that hard to imagine. I'd guess the people applying might not know at first that the call center job they're applying for will be for a scam, and then when they find out, they have to decide how badly they need a paycheck.

I once read an article describing a full-blown callcenter for scam calls operating out of Brazil. I guess that with the right connections, it's not that hard to hire a couple of people willing and able to do that kind of thing.

I always imagined it's kind of a secret evil promotion. If someone is really pushy in their standard advertisement out-calls, someone else comes to them "psst, you wanna know where the real money is?..."

Imagine their mindset. They may have the attitude that their work is fun.

Normal folks wouldn't do jobs involving trickery.

You realize you're writing that in a forum where half the companies are financed by advertising...?

Is scamming advertising?

No, you've got your Venn circles reversed. Advertising is a subset of scamming, not the other way around. There's plenty of scams that don't involve advertising; just look at Wells Fargo.

Wait, what about fraudulent "financial advisors" that will happily trash you for some extra profit? Wells Fargo? Just the semi-recent stuff...

Ugh, what did Wells Fargo do?... Oh, fantastic, now I have to go see if I have any accounts I didn't open. I wonder if I'll ever see the day where I'm sold off to some random company and find out they're actually running an honest business with quality products.

The accounts were all closed within two weeks. That was enough to get employee bonuses though.

"Normal" is culturally-defined.

Do they actually have call centers? I always assumed it was just one or two people trying to sound like they were in a call center.

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