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Love this! Almost fell off my chair laughing. Reading through the comments I saw some tender souls among us feel that Jolly Roger's kindly enticement to go on speaking is cruel, and wondered if there was a more humane way. I kept seeing the issue of the "What company is this? .... click" scenario. Given that there's a fairly high likelihood that the line callers for these guys are fairly gullible and/or cheaply greedy, as well as unlikely to be long term employees, I'm wondering if you could get one to flip on their bosses and provide a real location/target for the promise of $[500-1000?] to a PayPal account (of course it wouldn't be paid, fuck 'em they're scammers). I'm trying it next time one of them calls. Granted it doesn't accomplish the initial goal of being more humane, but good intentions and all that.

Edit: You can apparently be awarded $1500 in private action against an entity calling you if you're on the DNC list. For social engineering purposes maybe promise to split it with the representative and suggest that s/he might be personally on the hook for money if they don't help?




You wonder why you can't convince a scammer to give you valuable info in exchange for a fake promise to pay? You can noodle that out.


Close but not really what I said. I speculated that it is possible to do so, I didn't wonder why one couldn't. Think about who is calling you. The people working those phones aren't and never will be Kevin Mitnick. They're poorly educated, morally apathetic, have no real options, are unlikely to be employed at the same place in a few weeks anyways, and may in fact be being scammed by the people running the operation as well. People fitting that profile are prone to believing that they've gotten/will get lucky despite the evidence, see lotteries. They're basically indistinguishable from their ideal marks.

Also, yeah supervisors might be listening to the call/the call is recorded, but it would be uneconomical to monitor them all live all the time. Any attempt to turn them would hinge on their expectation that their remaining time at the gig is going to earn less than what they expect to get from you. If you can convince them that they could make $1500 now, that's a month's salary for them. If they expect to be fired tomorrow then even a chance that you're telling the truth starts looking worth it.




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