<p>I’m so tired of all these phone calls. The other night, I said, “Leave us alone,” and hung up the phone. DH said there was no reason to be that rude. I said, really?? These people are intruding on my time. We are on the do not call list, so they are actually BREAKING THE LAW! If they’re just “doing their job,” they are still not supposed to be calling us! Seems black and white to me.</p>
<p>My 19-year-old son worked for a telemarketing firm last summer. But he TOOK calls from people who saw an ad on TV or in print. He still felt bad when he convinced people to buy lots of stuff they didn’t really need. He said he won’t do that kind of job again.</p>
<p>I think desk top may have been taken over. Yesterday when I went to turn it off a bunch of alerts went off, and this morning it would not turn on. This evening I got a telephone call from someone claiming to be from “Windows support”, and I hung up right away. In hindsight I should have listened to his spiel. Meanwhile I cancelled my debit card (fortunately I don’t do online banking and have no credit cards). </p>
<p>Tomorrow I’ll take the desk top to one of my parish members who is a retired computer specialist for the state, so he can try to figure out if it was just a computer castastrophe and coincidence call, or I was really hacked. Hoping the latter, but cancelled the card just in case.</p>
<p>It may or may not have been “taken over”, need some one look at it. Not sure what do you mean “turn on”? Is it windows won’t load or the system does not show “power on”. If it is the latter, you may have a hard disk crash or mother board burn out. If you cannot boot into Windows in standard mode, there are other ways to boot and check out.</p>
<p>OT, not just phone and landline. I don’t answer my door bell anymore, just on the news and elderly couple opened the door to their home in Bev Hills and was shot by 4 armed guys. The wife was shot in the leg, the husband was tied. I only open my door for people with appointment.</p>
<p>Not all charitable solicitations are scams, but if I happen to answer one (I too work from home and I need to answer unknown numbers) I do let them say their spiel, while I do another task. And then I inform them that I only give to one charitable organization (a legitimate one) and then I proceed to inform the caller of all the great things my organization does. I then say they can use any help they can get as well. Usually the caller just says thank you and gets off the phone, but one time the caller said, in regards to a line that my organization rebuilt houses in Waveland, Mississippi, “I went to Waveland, Mississippi, too!” and he described his work there. Okay, so that one was a legitimate call, and we bonded, but most of the time I don’t think the callers have anything to do with the charities.</p>
<p>Oh, a really good one. While I was attending a class yesterday morning, Mr B answered a telemarketing call. The caller demanded to talk to Mrs B, but refused to introduce himself and give any information as to why he was calling. He even yelled at Mr B at one point that Mr B had no business lying to him that I was not available. Mr B then began playing “jealous husband” and gave the caller a nasty scolding. ;)</p>
<p>My dad called me one day because his elderly neighbor, a widow, had fallen for this scam. She paid the people $45 through her Discover card to give them access to her computer to “fix it” remotely and then they bricked it. Then they wanted $300 to unbrick it for her. She refused at that point, realizing it was a scam. They threatened her repeatedly and called her at least 8 times. They told her they were going to come to her house and do harm to her if she didn’t pay them. I told him she should call the police immediately. They took it much further than I’d ever heard of before but it does seem like the scammers are getting more threatening. </p>
<p>One of my professors in my Info Sec master’s program got the scammer phone call and she told them she only had Linux boxes and they got all flustered. </p>
<p>I would tell them I couldn’t talk right now but ask for a number to call them back and then call the police with that number. </p>
<p>^^^ that Windows scam is a bad one because if you give them access, the computer is encrypted and so far that I know, you can’t unlock it without a reformat/reinstall of software. Bottom line - have good backups!</p>
<p>Absolutely, but I did get around it because I have two copies of Windows XP in active partitions on the two hard disks and two copies of Windows Vistas in inactive partitions. You need an avid computer user to know how to get around the encryption. </p>
<p>Just got called about 15 minutes ago with the Windows scam from a heavily accented woman. I managed to keep her on the phone for 4 and 1/2 minutes before she hung up on me. One interesting note, in the middle of my lecture to her that she should be ashamed of herself and what she was doing was illegal and immoral, she asked me how old I am. Although she didn’t have the information in advance that I am an Apple person, she did know that I am a senior citizen and was surprised that an old lady knew about this scam. Like others have said, I can not ignore the phone for various reasons. Hanging up immediately seems to get more frequent call backs. Having them hang up on me seems to lessen the calls although that is probably not true.</p>
<p>I was wondering if keeping them on the phone stopped the calls. I was receiving these calls about every other day and would hang up after letting them know I was on the do not call list… Clearly that did not help. Finally they called and I had some fun… I told them I was so glad they called, and had 5 computers they could help with. After assuring them the computers were turned on and ready for their assistance they were to switch me to their supervisor… then they hung up. I guess they figured if I truly had five computers, I knew about the scam. I have not heard from them since.</p>
<p>DH got one of those calls. Very sweetly he said, “Oh, let’s just cut to the chase. You want my social security number, my passwords, and my banking information, right? You got your pen ready?” The caller kind of sputtered and said “of course not.” DH just laughed and said, “oh, okay, well I guess we have nothing to talk about then.”</p>
<p>Well, my 4+minute call didn’t give me much relief. I got two calls today, although they seemed to be from different sources. The early call came from a 917 number (I know that doesn’t mean anything) and the second call just said “incoming call”. This guy was more efficient; he hung up on me after 2 minutes of my lecture. I think the next time I will ask them to repeat everything since I am a bit hard of hearing. </p>
<p>Friends of my parents fell for the ‘Hi grandma I’m in jail…don’t tell mom…just send money’ scam. They gave everyone they knew a heads up. Sure enough, a few days later my mom gets just such a call. She caught on immediately (she’s 88 so that’s a big deal). She listened for a few moments and then asked her ‘grandson’ to repeat what he just said in German so she knew it was really him. Funny thing…the line went dead.</p>
<p>My generic answer to all scam calls (unless I’m bored and then I string them along with whatever comes to mind) is to simply say "OMG that is so amazing, I can’t believe I was selected. Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t do this on the phone but please put all this into the mail so I can sign up as quickly as possible. When can I expect your mailing, can you overnight it? Better yet…here is my fax (made up number) do you want me to hold on while you transmit this offer’. That usually results in a hangup.</p>
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