acpme said:
IR2, theres a thing called scambaiting which is where people respond to those nigerian emails and pretend to be lured into the scam. then they turn things around on the scammers -- such as pretending to be a church that will send money if the scammer joins the church and completes all the initiation rites... usually involving getting a ridiculous tattoo!
scammer gets scammed into getting tattoo
i've heard of one guy who promised to send money if his potential scammer would rewrite an entire harry potter book by hand. he scanned all the pages into pdfs and posted online. and of course never sent the money.
I
am embarrassed to have been duped. I'm usually the one directing others to the snopes site.
An interesting personal story as an aside...
The most savvy scheme I've seen happened this year with a two-stage phone call. First, I received call from a woman letting me know that there was some unusual activity on my credit card, and then rattled off 16 digits of gibberish. I let her know it wasn't me and she politely apologized and thanked me for my time. No request for info, no real threat sensed.
Seed of doubt planted in my head.
Next day, another call from an authoritative-sounding gentleman telling me that I was being sent to collections for unpaid bills. After shooting a quick, unfairly harsh look at Mrs. IR2 thinking maybe there was a Nordy's account that I wasn't supposed to know about, I asked what this bill was for. Then he gives me the, "Can I confirm your information?" but slyly asks me to give it to him, without giving me anything to confirm.
My response - "If you have the info, give it to me, and I'll let you know if that is me and my soc.sec.#"
His response - "I can't give that information out, but if you can confirm your d.o.b.?"
My response (still fairly calmly) - "I know who I am. I've paid all of the bills that I know of. If I'm being sent to collections I'm sure that you have my info, I'm still not giving it out. Who am I speaking with, again? He gave me an unconfirmable name (might've been skek jones, but I don't remember) and id# and then came his threat against my credit scores and that if I didn't clarify this, I would only penalizing myself.
He was persistent, and called twice more. When I reiterated my same stance the calls finally stopped.
I chalk it up to another cost of having your name and number (and balding headshot) on every bit of marketing that gets sent out.
Hope this may help even one of you out there. Guard your info.