Posted on 05/23/2014 4:27:59 PM PDT by Allen In Texas Hill Country
We stopped answering unknown phone calls a long long time ago. But I was outside and the wife, expecting a call, did answer the call. Trying to make a long story short.....
It was from a family member whom we care enough about that we would do almost anything for. The wife was convinced it was from this family member and when she told me she convinced me too. A few phone calls later involving public attorneys and lawyers we were told to send a very large sum of CASH using UPS.
And then,,,, FINALLY,,, I realized this was a scam. But the knowledge about the details of our particular family structure (a bit different) scares the hell out of us. We called the sheriffs office and gave them the details of the phone numbers used in the scam. The main one of which came from Montreal, Quebec. I did the reverse search after realizing.
Just posting to help others.
I have ATT Uverse, so phone calls come up on the TV screen. If the name is listed as “unavailable,” my philosophy is that means we have something in common.
Gosh that response is so funny and useful.
I just read your post verbatim to my wife. We have a daughter rapidly approaching that age and I can see myself responding to that call in the same way. My wife busted out laughing at the way you handled it. Kudos.
I got a junk mail today ostensibly from a court with a subject “Failure to Appear.” The mail naturally had an attachment. Didn’t open it.
Allen, the chances of that call actually originating in Montreal are ZERO. The scammers use IP Spoofing to hide their VOIP calls.
You are in big trouble now.
I have a neighbor with a lot of grandchildren. When these scams started he made each one of them make up a code word to be used if they were really in trouble.
A couple of months later I was talking to him and sure enough he had one of the scammers trying the scam using one of his grandchildren’s name. Didn’t work.
Thanks for the heads-up.
Reminds of a movie about a capture female officer set in WWII (or something similar.) The code phrase involved her admiration for dancing; however, she twisted the phrase enough to communicate she was under duress.
It was probably a summons for being a FReeper. Think I’ll wait for the storm troopers to appear on the doorstep.
It actually would be easy to get a little paranoid over internet privacy.
A few weeks ago, I was thinking of buying a scanner and looked at some on a couple of company’s web sites. Same thing for a battery pack for my old cordless drill.
While visiting some of my regular places on the internet, I see ads for scanners, exactly the ones I was looking at and sure enough, for battery packs.
Same thing for checking on Wal-Mart’s site for TV sets and now I get emails from them showing which TVs are on sale.
I only use startpage to have private searches. I always delete my files after visiting FB
Interesting the use some people have made of technological advances. It seems lately things like unending unknown callers come in waves, last for a couple of days, are from a repeating pattern of three different area codes and then they go away for a few days. Finally added caller ID in January on the business lines and we just don’t answer any calls that would seem to be suspect, letting them go to voice mail but no one leaves messages.
One of the issues we are encountering occurs because we have so many people calling our office who have moved to Houston this past year but kept their old number in their previous area code. Sometimes it just gets to be a judgment call and we choose to error on the side of caution and don’t answer.
I have also noticed the same increased pattern in suspect emails and the count of emails routed directly to spam really spikes one day a week, generally on Tuesday.
Not like we don’t already have enough to worry about when trying to run a business now but have this added burden, too.
Remember, dog fart credits are crucial in calculating carbon emission credits. Send me $100 and I’ll send you 10 Dog Fart Credits. Such a deal, you are in Israel.
The proper response to such a call is , “Let’s meet”....
I got a phone call on my cell like that. Some Wog was asking for somebody who had a number close. I put on my cop voice and asked why they were calling and when they asked who I was, I said I was Detective Vic Mackey and that this phone was found on a dead body and demanded them to ID themselves. That guy was befuddled but still refused to ID himself. had him and his supervisor going for 15 minutes before they hung up.
Funny, I never got another call on that phone again.
Seeing I'm the only one in the family with any money to speak of, I moved my family to a new home, didn't tell anyone where we moved to and no longer have a landline (cellphones that are all burners.)
I made sure they're not calling me. :-)
Get a browser that can have an adblocking add-on: Currently I am using Opera, Google Chrome works as well. And some of the mozilla open source browsers work - Waterfox (64 - bit). Reading a lot of people on here liked Pale Moon.
It is amazing what happens when you use the Adblock add on - no ads pop up, your history isn’t tracked the same way.
My answer: Hope you like the food there because you’re going to be there s long time.
When he was about twelve years old, my younger son picked up the phone and it was a salesman of some sort.
Instead of responding to the sales pitch, my son relentlessly tried selling bananas to the salesman.
Finally the salesman hung up on him.
:-)
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