Best common sense tip?
Change the bloody phone system to stop lines remaining connected when the call recipient hangs up!
Two men have been jailed following their conviction for running a series of courier fraud scams in south London, Surrey and Sussex. Shaun Moore, 22, of no fixed abode and Jevon Grant, 20, of Croydon were sentenced to 18 months imprisonment and two years in a young offenders' institution, respectively. Both pleaded guilty to …
Old hand here: I started writing a long reply with all the techie details about how the POTS system works, and why this couldn't be done easily. But then I realised I am far to old and know far too many intricate details about 20th century communications to keep anyone interested long enough for them to understand. So I won't bother.
However, it can be summed up as too expensive to do, and not their problem anyway.
It's not all that easy - but easy enough that BT is rolling this change out on AXE10 exchanges this week, with the older exchanges to be updated later - cutting the delay from 2-3 minutes to 10 seconds.
http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/updates/briefings/wholesalelinerentalbriefings/wholesalelinerentalbriefingsarticles/wlr00314.do
It works like this to avoid calls dropping when transferring from one internal handset to another.
A better solution would be to not hand over your card or reveal your PIN number to anyone, just like the literature says in bold when you receive your bank cards in the post.
Yes I understand that the elderly are vulnerable sometimes, but banks do take a sympathetic view and will refund vulnerable customers as a rule.
> Out of curiosity do you have a link to anything about this "Microsoft" tech guy?
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/03/31/phone_scam_operator_fined/
(Curious about the thumbs-down. Does someone really think it's worse to phone people up and tell them to give their cards and PINs to a "courier" than it is to run a call center that phones people up to tell them that that have a virus and to charge them money to remove it?)
I heard about this one around 1979, I would guess, and I tested it then, and it didn't work then. Did it work with really early telephone exchanges, perhaps? It's a shame The Register couldn't go into this technical aspect in a bit more detail.
The calling party not hanging up the phone causes me no end of problems!
If it's a call from a mobile, landline/ISDN it simply doesn't time out!
I noticed this in the 80s when a friend called (I was in my teens) and put the phone down saying I would
Call him back in an hour.
When I picked the phone up I thought the line was dead, but he was still holding the phone to his ear
And this still happens to this day
Also had the same problem in the 80s - for some reason a relative's phone would not reliably press the switches on the cradle properly when the handset was replaced. This would put our phone (and presumably anyone else they called) out of action - when we picked up the receiver to make the next call, it was possible to hear conversations, TV, budgie twittering. I do recall (possibly erroneously) that there was a time-out, but it was quite long. We persuaded her to get the phone fixed was only when her (huge) phone bill came in!
My guessing would be that it does not work with regular handsets or devices configured for normal consumer use, because these devices listen for the hang up and respond correctly. I would imagine you need a device which ignores this hang up notification.
...."My guessing would be that it does not work with regular handsets or devices configured for normal consumer use, because these devices listen for the hang up and respond correctly. I would imagine you need a device which ignores this hang up notification."
Not so. In fact I believe its ultimately a carrier or a local exchange problem. My example is Eircom. Even if you disconnected every single device in the home cutting them off from the phone line and even disconnected the outside line-in, it wouldn't fix the problem.
It would crop up where people unwittingly had not replaced the handset correctly at their end. It usually occurred when the other caller was also using a land-line but never a mobile. I don't know if it happens much any more and I've never seen this same type of problem in other territories i.e. USA, Asia, South America...
" Did it work with really early telephone exchanges, perhaps? "
Yup, when folks didn't have loads of lines available it was a common thing for mini cab firms to ring each other and leave the phone off the hook - it meant they couldn't get any customers phoning in.
You must have had some really shitty holidays!
However, we really have no need for people like those two. That kind of crime, targeting those kind of victims, is a demonstration of a an uncorrectable, extreme moral state that needs to be permanently, not temporarily, removed.
... but does your PIN count as an encryption key under the RIP act? Probably not, but if I make my encryption key the same as my PIN, can I claim that I'm now not allowed to tell the police when they ask? ... ok, ok, probably not going to work after all :-) Curses, foiled again!
If they pushed the law to its limits then yes it does, because entering your pin allows the contents of the chip to be decrypted and read by the reading device. So yes, I guess they could in theory ask for it, doubt they ever will though because they like this power and don't want it taken away from them.
When someone calls you, be extremely skeptical of anything they say. Refuse to cooperate.
If it's your bank, wait a while (so this scam doesn't work) then call them back at the number on the back of your card and ask them if they just called you.
If it's Microsoft, feel free to do anything necessary to keep them on the line, there's a contest running for longest time. My best is 20 minutes, answering all the questions, clicking and making sure he could hear me typing. I didn't bother telling him I was running Linux, and the menus are close enough that he continued along with his script, but finally gave up and told me to call Microsoft's support number.
It was then that I asked him (still playing the dumb user) if I should tell them I was running Linux.
There was a pause, then the start of a swear, then he hung up, leaving my wife and I ROFL for quite a while...she had immediately passed the call to me when she realized what it was and had been listening to my "efforts" to follow his instructions.
I kept a fake Microsoft support caller on the line for 45 minutes once by booting a Linux live CD to help me realistically feign ignorance every time they tried to run through their script, and asking simple questions about the reasons to pay them money etc. The caller was pretty upset by the end of it, presumably because these call centre staff don't get paid until they successfully pass you on to the real scammer. I believe they also don't always know they're involved in a scam.
But wasting the time of someone who may even have been an innocent party is nothing. My favourite story involved the recipient/target following the scammer's instructions and then taking control of the scammer's systems once the connection was made.
"Sorry, but age 20 means you are old enough to vote, drink alcohol, get married and join the army. It should also mean you are old enough to do time in the Big House."
I think you'll find most YOI aren't cushy open prisons, they are simply segregated prisons, often adjacent to a proper Big House, and sometimes even within the walls of the original Victorian site. There's plenty of razor wire and CCTV, locked doors that slam with a satisfying clang, and plenty of vile, aggressive scum to party with. Having said that, I'm not sure if there's any real evidence why young vermin shouldn't be incarcerated with older vermin.