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On 15/10/11 21:51, Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Sat, 15 Oct 2011, Tony Sumner wrote:I had one of these calls. She said her name was 'Nancy' and told me I had a Trojan. I said 'I don't use Windows' and told her that proved she was a b. liar. She got quite upset and said no I was the liar for saying I don't run Windows and hey I realised that I have a laptop that does have windows on it and it seems likely that she did have access to MS information. She also knew my address. A web site I looked at said that they tend to target older people (like me) so they may have a source of information that includes age and address.I'd be surprised if it was age, however, name, address and phone number aren't that hard to get hold of - it's called a phone book.Then there is the register of electors - did you opt out to their sales list (which anyone can buy), last time the letters came through? (Did you notice it's changed from opt-in to opt-out?)There are probably others too - data is valuable and people will sell your data for as much money as they think they can get for it - when it's OK for them to do so - read the small print and make sure you opt out of anything...We're ex directory and TPS registered. I've had one cold call this year, and technically it wasn't a cold call, it was a "marketing call" from a company who I currently buy product off (or one of their subsiduarys)But maybe I'm just lucky... Gordon
I've been TPS registered and re-registered for over 7 years and it's made no difference in deterring these off-shore scams.
Keeping them on the line to waste their money only wastes your time as they have ways of of reducing their costs to the absolute minimum (eg. VOIP with/without their own ISP). A few minutes googling will prove the point.
The following offers some tips for those of a "have ago" attitude and who are really frustrated. It's American but most of it also applies to the UK. If nothing else it should raise a titter.
http://www.artofhacking.com/files/live/aoh_pranks20.htm Keith -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ All e-mails including their file attachments are scanned for viruses and spam using Symantec's and ClamAV's scan engines. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq