Sonim phone
Oh come on. You’ve all gotten those annoying phone calls where someone calling from a boiler room in wretchedly broken English utters something along the lines of
This is Jim calling from technical support of Windows company.
I don’t remember the name, but that is the line I got most recently. I nearly broke up laughing when he said “Windows company.” They are so relentless calling. Seems most have a caller ID of
(408) 454 5940
at least the recent ones do. You might all want to go to whatever blocking app or service is available from your provider and just enter than number in. I’ve stopped reporting them for Do Not Call List violations. Nothing seems to come of it. I really wanted to include a link to some image of Homeland Security at the top of this post, but, after a short bit of poking around on the official Web site I didn’t see anything which was available for a regular tax payer to use. I also didn’t want to give the impression they have in any way condoned this post, because they haven’t.
While it may not be considered playing by the rules, I’ve started answering these calls, once they’ve uttered their pitch, with
Please hold while I transfer this call to Homeland Security.
Since I don’t have a quick method of transfer, I hang up. The almost always immediately dial back.
But why can’t Homeland Security set up a toll free hunt line number staffed with 20 agents or so? Why can’t the FCC or Congress mandate every phone service establish something like *666 which could be pressed during a call to transfer the current call to that toll free number at Homeland Security? Okay, I imagine the Pope would excommunicate me for the 666 thing, but we all want to send these people straight to Hell. While the FCC did manage to take down one of the IRS phone call fraud rings last year, they seem completely ineffective with these fraudulent technical support phone calls.
Can’t the case be made that much of the ill-gotten gains from these calls is used to fund terrorist groups? I’m sure it could if investigators could ever follow the money. Besides, Homeland Security would have access to all of those nasty little viruses which have made the headlines over the years. If each agent had a machine with a direct IP address and a whole slew of those black bag tools they could put all kinds of tracking bots and hard drive firmware viruses on the “technical support” PC. I mean, if the caller doesn’t know enough to get the company name right, just how much do you think they know about computers? Even the biggest technophobe knows Microsoft puts out Windows and once you’ve bought their product, they cease to care about you. I mean, if they really did care your computer wouldn’t need Norton Antivirus now would it?
It would be so cool if one or more of those little black bag things could cause the computer to somehow give off a tracking ping which could be picked up on by a missile guidance system. When we suddenly had one building with a whole bunch of pings somewhere, BOOM! Nobody said cyber warfare wouldn’t be actual warfare. Hopefully it would work with the guidance system of our cheapest ordinance. Why use a $2 million missile to take this scum out if we could do the same thing with ordinance that costs under $20K? Ideally they could equip some hovering drone with all of the guidance and just drop $20 mortar rounds on the place while hovering stationary overhead. That would be tax dollars well spent. It’s also the only way they are going to stop. Once word gets around that if you try to pull this scam your building suddenly blows up, they will all move on to some other scam, or a grave.
Yeah, yeah, due process, blah blah blah. If the money from this scam is in some way funding a terrorist organization they are enemy combatants and we are actively engaged in hostilities.
People in the clandestine world always say their successes are never known. Well, this is one success everyone could get behind. I don’t know about you, but some days I get 3-4 of these calls. Old people, the ones most likely to fall for the scam, who have phones with limited minutes suffer financial loss even if they don’t let the criminal into their computer.
