Scam artists are predators and I have a special hatred for human scumbag predators of every category. Scam artists don’t usually target the affluent because the wealthy make for the most difficult demographic to scam. I will make a possible exception for scam artists that successfully get the wealthy to part with a good bit of their ill-gotten gains. Most folks that obtain wealth do it through exploitation so turnabout is fair play. Anyhow, here is a fun vignette from my past.
Do you all remember circa 2018-2019 when scam artists criminal gangs operated with relative impunity in The Philipines? It was only a matter of time before my (telephone) number came up and I got the call to fight back against one such predatory gang. This particular gang had leadership with better than average information technology skills. I am guessing they cobbled together an Asterisk telephone system with a Voice over IP trunk that simply routes calls from the internet to the public telephone network.
These guys were crafty fuckers. They were probably using a primitive dialer that made calls to random numbers. If a number didn’t ring busy, it was immediately and quickly routed to an available agent. This was before the days of predictive and smart dialers that are able to disconnect a call just before going to voicemail or systems that use voice advisories like, “This number has been disconnected.” etc. You can imagine these criminal gangs probably had only a connection rate of about 25-30%. Of that connection rate, I’d say optimistically that the success rate could be around 10-20%. But those 10-20% would be seniors. These seniors had their entire life savings wiped out as a result.
So I fought back. Queue fun and games! They proactively reached out to advise me that a warrant had been issued for my arrest. After all, every law enforcement agency is kind and courteous enough to do this for its subjects under investigation. The unimaginably smug agent said, “This is Officer Jones from the US Homeland Security Defense Agency. A warrant has been issued for your arrest. I need your address and social security so I can stop the warrant.”
Yeah, okay. Sure, you’re Officer Jones. So, I decided to play along. In a convincingly slow and steady voice I gave the first three numbers as 1-2-3 and I waited for him to read them back to me. Then I pronounced the next two as forty five. He then read those back to me in a similar fashion. I rapidly said the remaining four numbers as, “6-7-8-9!” He paused a minute, realized he had been duped, and screamed, “Fuck you!” Law abiding citizen 1, criminal gang 0. After the call disconnected, I laughed so hard and I just had to try calling back the number to see if it was a legit.
The number was perfectly legitimate and not spoofed! Okay, round two. This time I reached Agent Frederick from the US Tax Enforcement Department. These cats are really low effort scammers. Another entertaining story comes your way. I get the same schtick but this time, I decide to do things a bit differently. I give him my address first. After all, I live on the quaint little street of 4 Horsemen Drive. Apocalisup, NY 19000. Apparently Agent Frederick was only slightly smarter than your average bear because he kept asking me to spell that before finally realizing he too had been duped. It took the reference a solid several minutes to sink in to our good agent’s noodle. Upon putting 2 plus 2 together, he must have been apoplectic with anger as revealed by the choice words he had for me about copulating with goats.
I managed to call back once more getting a different agent, this time giving my address as 666 Youranus Avenue before having my cell phone number blocked. Not to be outdone, I called back from my Google Voice number. Well lo and behold, I got Officer Jones again. This was simply too good to be true. I had to think on my feet here because my voice would give me away. Thus, I adopted a slow and whiny voice – somewhat plausible for an elderly person.
This time the goal was to put the fear of baphomet and the flying spaghetti monster on Ociffer Jones. But only after wasting as much of his time as possible. I wanted to give him the false impression that I was a very wealthy senior. So I casually dropped hints at having lunch and breakfast “appointments” at fancy, upscale hotels and calling out to my administrative assistant to set up private flights to exclusive resorts. Officer Jones was probably none too good a poker player because I could hear him grow excited and impatient to conclude business. He would gruffly steer me back on topic after I casually drifted off course as could reasonably happen to a senior citizen. Clearly he was eager to get the untold fortune of money that surely I must be sitting on.
After about 15 minutes of this, I began to tire of the back and forth. It was time to drop the bombshell. I gave him 5880 Highway 67 South, Florence, CO 81226. I can only imagine Ociffer Jones must have hungrily put that address into Google, dreaming of a fortune in gold only to have the color drain completely from his face when he realized I gave him the address to the USP Forence ADX facility, a so-called SuperMax Prison. It was then that I said, “The gig’s up motherfucker. You’ve been reported to the FBI.” I actually did report the phone number because even back in 2018-2019, there would be records of IP addresses connected to phone numbers. I don’t know if any action was taken but I do know that Filipino criminal law is neither lenient nor particularly forgiving, and even less so when it comes to crimes of predation.
