Telemarketers & Scammers

I am perplexed by what I see as a paradox.

On the one hand, despite my regular experiences with my fellow humans on the LA freeway system, I try not to think of everyone as a bunch of freakin’ idiots! Granted, there are more of them out there than I would like, but on average, we’re not that stupid.

On the other hand, telemarketers and scam artists all seem to be doing booming business. As best as I can tell, that can only be happening if a pretty significant percentage of the population has less intelligence and less common sense than your average loaf of bread.

We all get the annoying telemarketing calls with general contractors wanting to give us estimates, credit card deals that we can only take advantage of at this instant, mysterious dudes who will buy your house in any condition, get cash fast opportunities with a pink-slip loan, painters who will be in your neighborhood next week and can put you on the schedule also, and so on ad infinitum.

They’re annoying, they’re illegal, and they’re not going to stop any time soon. I won’t even start on the political ads which inundate us when the primaries and general election rolls around. The political ads are legal because the laws written by the politicians exempt them. Cozy, eh? That should give us a clue about how enthusiastic the regulatory agencies are at enforcing the law.

My problem right now is caused in part by my employment situation and by the fact that I’ve got this new volunteer position with the local CAF wing. Normally I would just not bother to ever answer the land line unless the caller ID says that it’s someone I know. But I don’t want to take a chance on missing a call related to the job hunt or the CAF, so I end up answering the phone.

Two scammers were particularly persistent, calling three or four times a day for the last couple of days. (Or at least, they have the same bogus information on the Caller ID.) I got sick of it today and answered.

Despite the different Caller ID data, both were someone claiming to be from “Windows Computer Service Office.” Both were people speaking in extremely heavy accents, almost unrecognizable, both reading (badly) from a script. When I asked the first lady to stop reading from the script and just answer a couple of questions, she hung up. When I asked the second guy, he wanted to argue that he really, really WAS from “Windows Computer Service Office!” I said that I was as likely to be working for the FBI as he was to be working for Microsoft, and I asked him if anyone ever fell for this bullshit he was forced to read. He was still cussing me out and making suggestions that were anatomically unlikely when I hung up.

There’s the paradox. I don’t see how these scams ever generate a dime. Who in the world would bother to listen to this utter crap song and dance, let alone give them credit card information and access to their computers? Yet, there is obviously someone or some organization (it sounds like the calls are coming from a room full of hundreds of callers, just like in the movies) who’s paying to run this scam, so there must be some financial return or they would quit. I don’t get it.

Ditto for the “general contractors” who want to give free estimates. Do people ever really, really give tens of thousands of dollars in remodeling work to someone who just called up on a robo-dialer? Yet they keep calling. What gives?

Another similar thing that caught my eye earlier this week I can now understand a little bit more, thanks to something passed on by a Pepperdine classmate just a few minutes ago. (I had a really good rant going about this one too, but you’re going to get the re-write.)

It seems that people are getting calls from someone claiming to be with the IRS, demanding immediate wire transfer payments of thousands of dollars or else their homes will be seized, they’ll lose their car, and so on. Another local scam I just heard about is similar, with the caller claiming that there’s an outstanding arrest warrant and  if the payment isn’t made you’ll be hauled off to jail.

Kneejerk reaction, as above, is who in the hell falls for this? How can you not know that the IRS and the police NEVER handle things this way? If I got such a call from “the IRS”, I would tell them that I would be more than happy to see them at the local IRS office, give them the address, and ask for their name, their supervisor’s name, the date of the tax returns in question, the document locator numbers for the claims… There might also be some choice vulgarity in there, but I would promise (pinky swear, cross my heart and hope to die!) to apologize if and when we ever actually met in person in a real IRS office and they proved themselves to be real IRS agents.

Guaranteed, they would be hanging up on me and moving on to the next mark long, long before I got 10% of those questions said.

They say they’re with the police and there’s a warrant? Fine, show up at my door, in uniform, and let me see a badge. Until then, I have some moves to suggest that the Kama Sutra overlooked, which I will of course apologize for if and when…

Then I saw the article that’s related to the ones I had seen. But it’s not from the New York Times or Los Angeles Times or Washington Post. It’s from India West Online and talks about how these scams are targeting immigrants and non-native-born Americans.

That makes far more sense. These clowns aren’t calling folks who were born and raised here. 99.999999% of the calls would get laughed at. But if you target people who know a lot less about our culture and institutions, who may have limited English skills, who can be blackmailed with threats of deportation in addition to arrest and financial ruin, then I would expect to have a much higher “success” rate.

It’s not that these folks are stupid, it’s that they don’t have the same backgrounds and “common knowledge” that others have. For con artists and the slimeballs who run these scams, someone who is a stranger in a strange land becomes the weak gazelle at the watering hole.

So, pass the word, particularly if you know someone whose cultural background might make them a target. The IRS will NEVER demand an instant payment, and they will NEVER call you on the phone, at least for an initial notice (or the first couple hundred after that). The IRS just loves, loves, loves killing trees to send you paperwork. That phone call is bogus.

Ditto for the police. If there’s an arrest warrant for you — they’ll arrest you. Pure and simple. Anyone calling on the phone, claiming to be the police, and demanding any kind of immediate payment at all is 100.0000% guaranteed to be bogus. You should just hang up.

With all of that said, I still don’t have a clue how the “Windows Computer Service Office” makes any money, nor do I have any good way to deal with the calls. Ignoring them completely is probably the best option (so my head tells me) but my Catholic school upbringing makes me want to punish them (a feeling that comes from the gut, not the head).

Their “currency” is time — they want to move on as quickly as possible to the next victim when it becomes obvious that you’re not going to bite. But I don’t want to tie up my precious time either. That’s why these calls piss me off so much in the first place.

Does anyone have any good suggestions on a technique that would tie them on the phone for a while, while also not giving into their scam in any way and not taking any of my time in return?