May EVERY low-life scammer on the planet meet a similar (or worse) fate!

These scammers are filthy rich.
They boast of bringing in $1 million to $5 million a week.
One "call centre" operator owns two private jets and homes in Paris, London, and New York.

And they prey on the elderly, unsophisticated users, and the poor.

I know how to play them along--I've held them for more than an hour many times. So they are not doing evil during this time. But this gets tedious.

2 tricks I have not seen described:
If this is "reduce your credit card debt" scam, they will soon ask for your "social". I ask if they mean facebook. (remember the whole effort is to make them waste time..spin out everything.) They get around to saying 'social security number.' Oh, says I, you mean the American health insurance plan? I don't have a social security number--I am Canadian. This causes them all manner of distress, hold the line, checking with bosses, etc. You can ad-lib for hours how you have a credit card from the Bank of Montreal, pay taxes to Canada, not USA, etc.

If this is the "fix your computer" scam as above, play along and they will get you to d/l supportme, teamviewer, or similar that allows them to take control of your computer. You can d/l the exe files safely--take lots of time, but--god forbid--do not open them. exe files allow stuff to be added to your computer and may be good or often evil.

Tell the scammer: a window pops up, says "you need administrator privileges to open these files".
This utterly stymies them... they will ask about your password--you know nothing about administrator passwords, never saw this before. I just turn it on. Where did you get this computer? Well my sister set it up for me... Invent stories.

The smart ones give up at this point; the dumb ones will ask you to use a different browser; restart, try again.
Decide on your patience level. Every one of your actions has to be veryn slow. Wait a minute, the postman is here; the cat needs her medicines every hour; carry on.

Incidentally, teamviewer has taken small, but good steps to limit use of its program in fostering scams.
Scammers now prefer support.me and some others, usually.

"Not good. Not good." I guess we can each imagine our own ending to the story of Raheed and the man who wanted only to provide for his family...

What drama.

I'm betting that's mighty close to $3

And I feel the pain of the supposed customer and also the tech.

How did that tech support keep his cool/humor without breaking out in laughter?

Fortunately, my brother thought to call me and my husband before they finished destroying her machine and stealing everything on it. My husband spent the next three days helping her re-install software on her machine and change all of her passwords. She also had to cancel her credit card and get a new account #.

These fucks are evil. This "scammer" is my hero. Thanks for sharing this.

Scammers really are the scum of the earth.

From what I can remember they started calling our home around nine years ago. They claim to be from Microsoft ( but not really a part of Microsoft, some kind of secret security branch ). Each time they call I know it is a line of bull. We have to listen to people like 45 around here. We know manure when we see it ( and hear it on the phone ).

After getting a few of these calls I asked one guy why he does not get an honest job. He told me in his East Indian accent "Sir I have had this job for eight years, from which I draw a paycheck once a month. According to a television news magazine that is true. These people are on some kind of wage system.

It was six months after that when I got the next call from a guy that was really pissed off that I did not want to talk to any of them. "What did we do to you, you fucking idiot. You are a damn fool for not accepting our help on these viruses that are attacking you computer". I lead him to believe that I ran a whole network of computers in an office when in fact I only have my one desktop.

Anyways my machine is safe, secure, and virus free.