Having Fun with Scam Callers

ooh the IRS one - yeah - I messed with them BIG TIME!! Kept calling them back and they BLOCKED MY NUMBER!!!

The worst was with my dad - when someone calling sounding like my niece (his granddaughter) that she had been arrested in Mexico and needed $2K to get out. Called him the CORRECT name, sounded like her! He called me and asked if I knew where she was (he couldn't get a hold of my brother or sister or her brothers!) I told him NOT to do anything. Got a hold of her and she was at working, teaching. Whew.

I manage to evade 99% of them, but once in a great while one gets through.

My go-to routine with these annoying scammers starts as soon as they ask the usual "how are you today" or another similar greeting.

So I let them know how I am, without taking a breath. Usually goes something like this:

"Thanks for asking, I'm really unhappy with the grocery store prices today. Can you believe how expensive eggs have gotten? And really, how do you decide between cage-free and pasture-raised? And is organic important to you? I know it is to me, but it's hard to find sometimes. So I was in the grocery store this morning and I saw tofu on sale! I don't think people appreciate tofu enough, but let me tell you about this tofu dish I made recently!", and on and on, without giving them a minute to respond.

Or I take off on a rant about how some people never vote, and how important it is to use your vote, or ocean pollution and how much plastic is in the ocean and how that makes me feel. Or how I'm thinking about knitting a pot holder but I can't decide between pink and fuschia or magenta or maroon and how my grandmother always had homemade pot holders. Any stream of consciousness works.

They usually hang up or just wish me a good day. It's a good energy release for me, and it guarantees they'll never call me again.

I've heard of people getting the IRS scam calls and saying, "Hey, I work at the IRS, too! Who's your boss there?" The scammers hang up.

oh i wish i could stop the super annoying one about my credit.. they always claim there is no problem right now.. so why are they calling? its automated and always calls from a local number that seems to be disconnected when i call it back... how to stop those and my phone would be silent for days at a time
if you have time you could say hold on a sec, then set the phone down for a while and then silently hang up
i like to place the phone near the toilet and flush it. never saying a word. just the toilet noise. or get a whoopie cushion and blast that noise at the phone. even an airhorn might be fun. or fircrackers going off and say its a bad time call me later. make vomiting noises... ask them to hold then play them music for several minutes before returning to the phone and saying 911 what is your emergency?

My husband LOVES messing with these people.
Sometimes he'll pretend to be an elderly, gullible person and play along to the very end, then get "disconnected". If they call back he answers with "This is agent so and so with the FBI, we are currently tracking this call to find your location" or something along those lines. Pretty funny. He enjoys it a bit too much LOL

Updated

My husband LOVES messing with these people.
Sometimes he'll pretend to be an elderly, gullible person and play along to the very end, then get "disconnected". If they call back he answers with "This is agent so and so with the FBI, we are currently tracking this call to find your location" or something along those lines. Pretty funny. He enjoys it a bit too much LOL

I hate them too.
Not much you can do about robo calls - I just hang up.
When I get a live person - what happens next depends a lot on the mood I'm in.

All our numbers are on the Do Not Call Registry.
When I get a charity - and I get a lot of them - I ask what percentage of the donation actually goes to the charity.
They've been hemming and hawing about this but they have to answer by law.
Some lovely sounding charities - for law enforcement/military orphans, make a wish type charities, etc - get ten cents out of every dollar donated.
I kid you not.
I'm so NOT paying for that - and I tell them so.

When I give to a charity I donate a check directly so %100 of the money I donate goes to the cause.
I'm not providing a living wage to telemarketer organizations to they can call and annoy me more often that they already do.
Illegally - since they aren't suppose to be calling me in the first place.

At any rate - for the last month or so - when I get a call I tell them they are in violation of the Do Not Call Registry and are subject to a $40 fine each and every time they call my number.
It seems to get me off their dialing list rather quickly and the calls have decreased.

As for scam calls -

Yep I got the IRS call - I told them to go ahead and arrest me.

I actually got a call from someone claiming to work for Publishers Clearing House.
They said I had won - and I needed to send a check to clear 'processing fees'.
Well I know that PCH doesn't do that and I said as much.
She hung up quickly.

Once for the Microsoft Support scam calls - I use to get so many of these - I answered the phone and told them they had reached Microsoft Support "How may I direct your call?".
The guy on the other end was like "Are you kidding me?!?!".
I had him going for a good 15 minutes.

After awhile it got old and when they called I told them "Look you idiot - you are never getting what you want from me. It's a waste of time calling this number. Stop it.".
And that seemed to do the trick.
I haven't heard from them in months.

Additional:
I've got to say I'm a little leery of responding to brand new members on this site especially after what we've just been through.
I might wait and see before responding to unknowns for awhile and see if they start pitching a fit.

if i'm feeling particularly evil i do this. just a few weeks ago the microsoft virus fellow with a thick foreign accent called. after i gushed and enthused for a few moments he invited me to suck his &^%$ and told me he would be at my home shortly.

i told him to hurry, the hot tight barrel of my magnum was eagerly awaiting him.

i should probably just hang up.

ETA omg, i didn't even know there were phones with 'block this number'! i want one!

but don't the scammers use a new number every time? some of the numbers are from the local exchange, and in a couple of alarming cases it was MY number.

khairete
S.

I have a friend who'd occasionally get an obscene phone call. Before the days of caller ID and stuff.

She'd keep talking to them and eventually they'd be so "bothered" that they'd hang up on her. She could really talk dirty.

My father in law got an IRS call on Friday. He told them thank you, let him get his credit card, he was glad he could look forward to 3 meals per day, no bills to pay, and being locked in a safe environment away from his abusive family...they hung up.

I received the IRS one and told them they were calling me at work. And guess where I worked? Oh yeah. The IRS. Asked them their badge number and where they were so we could get together and discuss.

They hung up fast and never called again

I'm boring. I just say no thanks and hang up (as they keep talking). Oh, and I hit "block this number" each time which means I never hear back from that particular line anyway.

Elena - love your response lol. That made my day!