Having done my time in the tech support trenches, I do one hell of an "end user" impersonation. I held one of these guys on the line for 1 hour 20 minutes one evening, then told him my phone was dying and that I'd need to call him back. I called back two days later and tied him up for another 20 minutes before he finally cracked and hung up on me.
Yes, it was a terrific waste of time, but boy did it feel good. I consider it volunteering. All the time I spent on the phone with the scammer was time they couldn't spend targeting vulnerable individuals.
Better than I did. I got a call from "Visa" about a decade ago telling me that hackers could break "the codes" used to protect my credit card. I played dumb and gave him a card number (first 16 digits of pi) and we ended the call. I just a bunch of callbacks that I refused to answer several minutes later.
I was still on dial-up and I don't think any of my credit cards offered virtual numbers at that point, but I should have set up a card with a $0.00 or $0.01 limit and given that to him, and then sicced fraud services on 'em.
I wonder if they have phone metrics as well - "What do you mean you spent 80+ minutes on the phone with him and didn't get the credit card number? Don't you know where this will put you in the stack ranking?!?"
Given that it's a criminal enterprise, with a direct financial link between a person's performance and the money they make, I'd guess that 1) their metrics are really easy, e.g. did you make at least $X today? and 2) the consequences for not measuring up are substantially worse than a poor annual review.
I did the same for an hour or so. What made it fun was while he was doing everything he could to get me to run their .exe file, he didn't clue in that I was running a Mac (and, of course, I didn't tell him: I just expressed polite confusion why his instructions weren't working).
Haha. Got a call like this at work one day and did the same thing for a few minutes ("Hmmm, 'Start Menu'? I'm having trouble finding it..."). Before it was all over, all my coworkers in the area had turned their chairs and were just watching and listening. A collective "WTF?" was let out when I got off the phone.
I get these calls at least once a month and sometimes as frequently as once a week (I'm in Perth Australia and they call from India). I always tell them I need to change phones to be next to my PC then I place my phone next to my speakers which are normally blasting out music and just leave it there. They are never on the end when I pick it up again but they do keep calling.
Yep. I really had the guy going. I spent a lot of time with him, at first feigning suspicion about who they were, then finally muddling around with the computer coming up with every possible way to make things difficult, but always remaining polite and thanking him repeatedly for "getting me out of a bind" and other silly sounding colloquialisms. I started pressing the info button on my phone so it would beep, and he gave me a number with a 918 area code. I looked it up and it's an Oklahoma number. That doesn't mean much though. The numbers could be issued by a SIP provider that terminates pretty much anywhere in the world.
While it's fun to do this, sometimes I think of the flipside. This scammer is probably trying to make a living and support his family. The company's owner though, is probably not in the need to do these unethical things. He/she should be screwed over.
I'm not advocating for his actions, just offering another point of view. Is it always correct to assume that the guy who xut you off in traffic is just an asshole, or does he really really need to be somewhere right now (eg. a hospital)?
What else would you suggest? Sure, the guy making the call is probably desperate, but by wasting his time, you are keeping him from calling gullible people. Even if the guy making the call never costs the owner because the caller gets paid on numbers gleaned, it still ties up the owner's phone lines and costs him rent.
No, bu why actively screw with the file and rank employee? Assuming he just gets a salary, cool, waste all his time (which costs the scamming company). But if he works on commission then why bother?
I would put my efforts in bringing down the company itself. (In fact I am actively fighting a company that tried to scam me. But their low-level employees? I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt).
That's entirely fair (and I think you're right, if your goal is to mitigate their harm as much as possible), but you were previously arguing that it was actually bad to screw with these people, not just a sub-optimal use of time.
Yes, it was a terrific waste of time, but boy did it feel good. I consider it volunteering. All the time I spent on the phone with the scammer was time they couldn't spend targeting vulnerable individuals.