This weekend, while watching some evening TV with my daughter, I got a phone call. The called ID said the call came from "Red Bank, NJ." I know no one in Red Bank and so was unlikely to be receiving an after-hours call from the place. But I answered out of curiosity anyway and got a young man with a clear Indian accent telling me that he was "Justin Roberts" and that he was calling me from "Windows Technical Support."
Not this again.
I should know by now that the best way to deal with the legions of people peddling this scam is simply to hang up. But the moral crusader in me wants these guys to, at the very least, know that I know what they're doing. Surely some of them will at least get angry or offer half-hearted justifications. Surely some of them will at least care that they are caught out in a scam. But no, they don't. Justin was no exception.
Q. Okay, come on. What's your real name?
A. Justin Roberts.
Q. No, seriously, what's your real name?
A. Justin Roberts.
Q. Come on.
It wasn't his simple insistence on being Justin that offended me—it was the fact that my doubts didn't even anger him. Put yourself in Justin's situation for a moment. You call someone on the phone and they immediately suggest that you are lying about your name. This should not prompt amused protestations that your name is in fact Justin; it should make you angry that someone you don't even know is calling you a liar—and about something as personal as your name. But when you spend your days actually lying about both your name and occupation while attempting to rob total strangers, the accusation no doubt loses its sting. Justin couldn't even muster up the energy to fake outrage at my questioning.
But he didn't hang up, either. Not being schooled in the realities of working in a VoIP-based call center devoted to foreign fraud, I would have assumed the only way to make money would be in volume. The moment someone questions your name in a hostile fashion? Hang up and move on to the next potential mark.
Not Justin. He was happy to keep asserting his Justin-ness until I gave up, then proceeded amiably along the script, telling me that his company had been monitoring my computer and saw that I had downloaded a virus, etc, etc. I told him that I write about these issues for a living and that I had actually covered this well-known scam. This still didn't lead to a hang-up. Justin told me that was just not true and that "Windows Technical Support" was a wholly legitimate business. All of which pushed me to a disturbing conclusion: simply denying reality again and again must actually work on some percentage of targets, even upon those who tell you that they know you are scamming them. It was like watching some kind of postmodern performance art.
It soon became clear that I could tell Justin almost anything—that I knew all about the FTC operation that had shuttered some of these sites, that I had received these calls before, that I was aware of a whole Internet subculture devoted to trolling the scammers—and that he wasn't going to hang up. Curious to see just how far this would go, I told Justin to go rip-off someone else instead and to leave me alone. Even then he didn't hang up right away, giving me a chuckle and a "have a good night, buddy" before signing off. No big deal.
Safe behind his spoofed phone connection and his distance, this was nothing more than a game designed to transfer some cash into Justin's pocket. He wasn't angry about anything I said, nor was he concerned about getting caught. In the end, only one of us was upset by our short conversation—me—because, despite FTC action, Justin was right. There was nothing I could do about any of this, and little chance that anyone else would stop him either. While plenty of people delight in baiting the scammers, some of the scammers must likewise take a perverse pleasure in listening to their angriest targets work themselves up to little effect.
What a strange feeling—two people connecting across the planet, able to speak on the phone and exchange money through credit cards and open computer systems to remote control, yet one can remain so hidden from the other that even brazen scams pose no risk and create no fear. Thanks, Internet + human nature.
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