Phishing and telemarketing telephone calls

Mon Apr 27 18:12:43 UTC 2020

On Mon, 27 Apr 2020, William Herrin wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 7:32 PM Matthew Black <Matthew.Black at csulb.edu> wrote:
>> Good grief, selling a kit for $47. Since all robocalls employ Caller ID spoofing, just how does one prove who called?
>
> You don't. AFAICT, that's the point of Anne's comments. Finding them
> is good enough. Paying off anyone who both finds them and appears well
> connected with the law is cheaper than allowing the legal system to
> become aware of their identities and activity.
>
> Blackmail 101 dude. Find someone with a secret and demand payment for
> your silence. The best part is that if you're legitimately entitled to
> the money because of the secret then it's not technically blackmail.
>
> Presumably the meat of the $47 kit is about how to tease out enough
> clues to search public records and identify them.

In my experience, the caller-id is always forged, and the call center reps 
hang up or give uselessly vague answers if I ask what company they're 
calling from.  I suspect the only sure way to identify them is to do 
business with them, i.e. buy that extended warranty on your car, or at 
least start walking through the process until either payment is made or 
they tell you who you'll have to pay.  I wonder, if you agree to buy the 
extended warranty, solely for the purpose of identifying them, can you 
immediately cancel it / dispute the charge?

Then there are the 100% criminal ones calling from "Windows Technical 
Support" who want to trick you into giving them remote admin access to 
your PC.  I assume that's a dry well and the best you can hope to do is 
waste as much of their time as yours and see how foul a mouth they have.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
  StackPath, Sr. Neteng       |  therefore you are
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________