If you come to India, you know what we do to Anglo people?

Yes, I'm sure France isn't having any problems either.

Look, I don't care how fucking racist you think it is.

If you want to come to America you come to America to be an American (or British or French). Don't leave whatever hellhole you are leaving and then come to a civilized country and then try to bring all the shit you just left.

But I know how intellectually dishonest you are on topics that don't fit your internal narrative.

Wow, what a mess of a comment! Way to go!

What does that have to do with the US? If people behave in an illegal fashion, they'll be prosecuted. If they are just being assholes, welcome to the club. There are plenty of so-called real Americans who fit that word quite well.

Making things up about my opinion to argue an irrelevant point?

I agree, that's why my children are studying indigenous languages. It's high time we all drop the disgusting cultural traditions brought here by our ancestors.

Quick question, what's my internal narrative? You seem to know more about it than I do, so if I'm going to be intellectually dishonest about it, I'd best learn what it is.

Your comments are dumb, I respond to dumb comments because I don't like to see people try to pass-off untruths as fact. We do not have Sharia gangs in this country, we have not lost our heritage because some people speak Spanish at home, and my marriage isn't threatened by George Takei's.

That last one is there because I know you aren't against gay marriage. The stupid that informs the people who are? That's the same stupid that informs Castle's comment about multiculturalism. Who do you want to be?

So all Indians are savages now?

Do you tell that to your friends in the curryhouse that you used as the template for characters in your book?

A scam that seems obvious to you is not so obvious to a little old lady who is just getting used to finally getting her first computer and going online. In fact, my parents got one of these calls and genuinely believed what they were being told, mostly because they didn't understand a lot of the terminology. I happened to be there at the time so I spotted what it was, but if I hadn't been, who knows? In fact, if you do a bit a bit of Googling you'll probably find that older people are really the main targets of these scams and are the ones who get caught out most frequently.

Yeah, that's a really great example of how civilized India is.

Maybe the mob was upset because an illegal immigrant raped one of their people.
One of those tribal rivalries or whatever. If it was one of their own that did I'm guessing there wouldn't
be an angry mob.

As has been stated and apparently not understood:

1. The people setting up the scam (and the call center running it) are probably not the same people sitting on the phones.

2. They're using an auto-dialer, not punching numbers into a phone by hand. They likely don't know a single thing about any specific person they're calling. Yes, I'm sure they know their targets are supposed to be in the U.S., but it seems unlikely that they have enough information about any given target to know if the auto-dialer screws up and connects them to someone in the same building.

I'm talking specifically about India's rape culture, not the broader culture it's a subset of.

Different subculture.

So what's the subset then? You responded to a comment I made to Garamet, not you. How do you know who she was talking about?

Nothing has been "stated" and misunderstood. That's nothing more than pure speculation you have advance to save face over your pathetic invention of an anecdote.

It's pretty amazing how they have enough information to make comments about the person's location, computer, etc., yet can't tell whether they might have somehow connected to another telemarketer reading the same script. What a fantastic story!

It's conjectural, certainly, but it's based on a very solid understanding of how call centers operate combined with the performances of these scammers. When the call is picked up, there's an approximate 2 second lag before anyone is on the other end; that tells me the call is being placed by an autodialer and then routed to someone on a call center floor. Since they don't ask for me by name -- and a well orchestrated setup would have them use it if they had it -- they haven't got it. They have no idea to whom they're speaking until their target gives them a name.

That certainly explains why I've been getting these calls.

They knew the names of my parents. Just saying....

How long after you picked up the phone and said hello was it before someone answered you? That question aside, it's not as if, once a scam is trotted out, only the original scammers ever use it from then on. For all anyone here knows, the ones you got a call from are right there in the U.K., while a different gang of them is calling the U.S.

No, the calls come from abroad. In the UK my parents are signed up to the Telephone Preference Service. If you're on that register it's illegal for people to cold call you in such a manner. They do it from abroad because they're much harder to trace and pursue. As for picking up the call, if you read up thread I didn't pick up the phone, they did. So I couldn't tell you how long it was before there was an "answer".

Castle is trying to shift the subject from boasting about the confrontation he didn't have, to one about how to recognize the scam. Nobody here can't recognize the scam, just as nobody here believes his story.

I'm doing no such thing. I'm substantiating how the "reverse prank call" happened.

No, this is what you're doing.....

So you're accusing me of making something up, not just about the specific call I fielded which you didn't hear, but about a type of scam call you admit you didn't even hear. If I'm diggin' a hole, you got that photo from the wrong angle, because I'm excavating your ass.

Yes, because you are.

I did hear the scam, as I said earlier in the thread. I spoke to them on the phone. I just wasn't the one to answer the phone, my parents were and were being suckered in. I stated all this up thread. For a writer you certainly have a worrying lack of attention to detail.

I really have no need or desire to hear about your homoerotic desires.

You base that assertion on what? You neither heard the call, nor did you see what information -- if any -- was available to the one who called.

I already told you up thread what I base it on, namely the unrealistic scenario that they would not know the difference between calling abroad with a foreign ringtone and number, and having an American accent initially answering the call, and phoning a colleague in the same office. Again, not paying attention are you Mr. Spillane?

Your story flunks the smell test, Castle. And let me add, if it were true, the fact that a self-proclaimed writer can't tell it in a convincing fashion is kind of sad.

Bingo. This as well. I was going to add intuition above, but the "smell test" is a much better way of putting it. You can smell the bullshit a mile off.

And I defeated both those objections by pointing out that they're using an auto-dialer rather than manually dialing numbers. The machine hears the American-accented 'Hello' but the call center employee on the other end of the call does not. Since he also isn't manually dialing the number, he need never know what the number actually is.

I know all that from having worked in call centers doing everything from inbound customer service to outbound collections to skip tracing. I've been on both sides of an auto-dialed call -- I know what they're likely to see and hear, and what they're unlikely to see and hear, based on how they open the call.

Depending on the nature of the call, you get more or less data on your screen. If it's outbound commercial calling, you get a, as in one, name, and maybe a city. Maybe. If it's inbound customer service, all you get is the number, which will then generally be used by the software to populate the rest of the customer's information -- if the call is coming from the customer. If not, the database throws an UNKN code. If it's outbound collections, of course you already have all the info. If it's skip tracing, you have old/bad info which you then run through a database like Merlin Data to find the delinquent, and then you're the one who updates/corrects the old/bad info.

But these people are calling random numbers banking on finding somebody who owns a Windows computer. They're not going off a database of any kind; if they were, they wouldn't be calling Macintosh owners like me in the first place.

What nonsense. It's bullshit speculation, nothing more. You have no idea whether or not they are using an auto-dialler or not. You also have no idea what us heard on the other end when then call us picked up.

Again, this assumes that the scammer is in a call centre, presumes the technology they use by assuming that offices in India are using the same equipment as you used, none of which you could possibly know. Consequently you are offering nothing but supposition, and the fact that you are labouring so much on trying to convince us is yet another red flag of BS.

So how were they able to address my parents by name when the call was answered? There must be a lot of people out there who have the same name, eh? Something else I stated above that, again, slipped past you.

I'd also add to all of this that there's no way in hell that you could've pulled a convincing Indian accent because there's no way you'd know the native language of the caller since you wouldn't have known where the call centre was based or where the person was from. The caller may have been a speaker of Hindi, Urdo, Gujurati, Tamil or any other one of the 25 odd other official languages of Indian, to say nothing of regional dialects. Quite simply your accent wouldn't have carried any of the necessary inflections to be convincing and would've sounded no better than a westerner pulling of a parody like gross exaggeration. Hell, you can't even type regional British accents that sound remotely convincing to an actual Brit, so you expect me to believe you convinced an Indian that you were from the same town as him? Yeah, ok mate.

But, hey, congratulations on being one of the few people to seemingly blow off a low level call centre career to spend years writing a short story and making up lies online. I'm sure the scammer would've been far more impressed with that than your attempt at an Indian accent.

If Castle's audible accent dialect work is the same quality in his writings, I can't imagine how he'd fool anybody in to thinking something beyond the fact that he's a complete tool.

As for the tech they use for dialing, I can't say, but when I got one of those calls, they knew my name, and the manufacturer of my computer. Castle has shown his hand, because if he knew anything about this scam, it's based on spyware infecting your computer first. As he often glibly states, spyware doesn't target the Apple products he favors*.

* He's wrong about that, but it's still serves as a failure in his logic.

Yeah, actually, I do know they were using an auto-dialer, based on the fact that it was approximately 2 seconds of dead air between my 'Hello' and their greeting. It wasn't 2 seconds of listening to background noise of other people on other calls -- it was 2 seconds of dead air between which the machine detected a response and when it had routed the call to an open line on its PBX.

I know exactly that based on my own familiarity and experience with the technology.

You've told us more than once now that you weren't the one who answered the call! How do you know whether the scammer actually addressed your parents by name or not?

I emulated the caller's own accent. I have that talent, especially after hearing it more than once, I might add. You're assuming I pranked them the first time they called with their bullpuckey. And no, the ability to guess and phoneticize your accent has nothing to do with the ability to emulate an accent vocally by ear.

Anyway, isn't a funny anecdote sort of a stupid-ass thing to pick a fight with me about? The hell are you thinking?