How should I mess with scammers?
How should I mess with scammers?
So I look through the whole son died PS5 on Facebook thing. I know a number of them will block you if you point out it's a scam so I try to warn people through messaging privately. But I've found someone I want to mess with. But yeah I told them I live in Indiana and they told me they live in. Wisconsin. I tell them that's just 2 states away I can go all the way there. They still do insist on paying shipping. So I want to find a way to mess with them and waste their time thinking they have a potential victim.
I've really enjoyed the videos of James Veitch on annoying scanners. Especially this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MHDDSekvcE. The scammer wants him to contact this "bank" and open an account. He than makes up, that he read somewhere that you get a free toaster with any new account. He than goes on and on about the free toaster until the scanner asks him to stop emailing him.
Acting like a confused old person in the least helpful ways possible is always fun. I would sometimes do this with telemarketers who called. I'd adopt a doddering old woman persona, who would say "ehh?" and ask them to repeat things over and over again, and when they asked her for information I'd go "let me look for that", put the phone down, and then go make a bunch of loud noise as if I fell down.
This is the best way to do it because they will go further on the off chance that you are a prime scamming victim rather than someone winding them up. Hooked one for about 25 minutes once because I said the phone wasn't next to the pc, so I had to keep shuffling between the two. Every time I came back from the pc, I gave the phone a whack on the table to make them jump.
By educating and helping your friends and neighbors about how they operate to denying them victims
The addresses they'll send are mostly shipping companies that take stuff and ship them directly to another country. Check their address, you'll very likely see such a building that advertises to ship stuff.
Tell them to contact you in ways they're not designed to, maybe stretch them thin in the process.
Reminds me of a presentation I saw a few months ago by netsafe which is an new zealand non profit that has an ai driven system to keep scammers busy. You can try it out or learn more about it here: https://rescam.org/
I think I saw a video of someone using ChatGPT voice feature and hand it over to the scammer, who thought they're dealing with a real person.
Similarly, this guy would let Lenny handle it: https://youtu.be/XSoOrlh5i1k?si=PA1FWk4x3pYRpr3x
Block them and move on. Half of scamming is getting money. The other half is trolling by wasting the target's time.
I get it though. These assholes piss everyone off. Wanna counter them? Get really good at a hobby. Fall in love. Make a fuck ton of money. Etc.
Wasting even a moment of your time on these pieces of shit is time you aren't doing the above. Don't let them take from you that which you owe yourself