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Comment by m101 | Hacker News Reader

My strategy has been to do the exact opposite. I've claimed to have had the accident, spoken to the real person, asked them to hold the line whilst I finish something off some "urgent" work, received the follow up call after they hang up and asked them to call me back in a couple hours, again kept them waiting a few minutes. It really wastes their time and turns me in to an expensive call for them. Yes, it's wasted my time, but if we all did this they'd quickly run out of money.

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I employ one of two strategies. Either I answer with “911. What’s the location of your emergency?” or similar. If it’s a live person calling it usually gets them nice and confused. I then get to yell at them for calling an emergency line. My favorite was the guy I talked to when I pretended to be “Shepard Sharp, deputy director of the NSA”. “How did you get this unlisted number? Where are you located, we are dispatching a team to your location now.” This person seemed to believe me.

The second and more common is to simply ask for their company name, their name and employee number, and their boss’s name. By the time I get to the third question they hang up and often don’t call back again. In my state you can sue for unwanted cell phone calls and the max you can get is something like $1200/call, which I am happy to inform them of. No clue how to actually do this but if someone automates the process of filing a suit, I will split the profits :)

https://donotpay.com is an automated service that will collect the information you obtain from illegal robocallers and allow you to craft a demand letter.

Source: I've sent demand letters to vehicle extended-warranty robocallers using DoNotPay

Have the demand letters worked out so far?

Is also like to know if this has worked.

Yes when I'm getting a spoofed caller ID I like to ask where they're calling from, or just innocently, "who am I speaking to? what is your company name?"

I've never gotten enough information to file a complaint

A friend of mine used to actively enjoy doing this. Most of the calls he got were of the "we hear you've had an accident" variety, and he would start with a generic story about something like a car accident. The story would slowly get more and more bizarre until he's eventually telling them a story like how he hit a lorry full of miniature circus animals, with loads of tiny tigers and giraffes bouncing off his windscreen. He'd see how deep he could get them into the story before they realise they'd been had.

If it was actually a real person calling me about the accident, I'd love to respond with a furious "no it's YOUR fault' and try to convince them I'd literally just had an accident answering the phone whilst driving.

The time I told the robocall bot that this was very worrying because I was on my way to a driving test was actually true though. :D

I did something similar to this a while ago, but the scam was happening via text messages.

I spent a full weekend texting back and forth with the scammer.

Although I never went as far as your lorry of circus animals, I did give _many_ hints to him that he was being played with.

Now, the more interesting part is that I was particularly fed with scammers and wanted to see if I could out scam one, which I did.

On the Monday after that weekend, I managed to get my scammers to provide me with his bank account username and password.

Once I got this information, I checked that they were correct credentials and stopped all and every contact. I also did nothing with it as I didn't want to myself be on the wrong side of the law, nor did I want to mess too much with a scammer and get myself in trouble.

You can find lots of similar stories here:

https://www.419eater.com/

There is actually a dude who streams this https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga

I don't see how people can sit there and watch this live with him trying but normally the clipped/edited videos are pretty funny how much he can waste their time

I was livestreaming about a month ago and kept getting spam calls, so I decided to try to see what I could find out.

A website they pointed me to had a multidomain SSL certificate gave me a list of other scammy domains, and one that appeared to sell robocalling software. On that site I found a phone number to call to get started. I called the number and somebody immediately answered! I pretended to be an interested customer for a while, and he claimed to be the author of the software. I wasted his time for about 10 minutes asking questions about how it worked, and where i could get lists, etc. Then told him I wanted him to add a patch to prevent my number from being called again, and that I'd be calling him again if i got anymore calls.

It was very fun!

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