I received a call at work recently. The caller did not have the right name, and when I explained that he had a wrong number, he became insistent on getting my name. I explained that since he had the wrong number, my name was irrelevant.
He kept calling back, insisting that I had won a $1.2 million lottery prize. I told him he was a fraud, and hung up on him. He kept calling back, and I let it go to voicemail--and so now he knew my first and last name. He was pretty obviously a bit stoned.
The next time, my boss picked up the phone, and now the guy at the other end (whose caller ID showed up as an 876 area code in Kingston, Jamaica) now told her that he was a Colombian drug dealer, and that I had failed to pay for five kilos of cocaine, and there was a $50,000 contract out on me, but that if I sent $5,000 overnight to a woman at a particular address in Georgetown, South Carolina, the contract would be held back. My boss then asked him where I lived--and the address he came up with was clearly made up out of thin air. She then pointed out that he had called a state agency...a state law enforcement agency, in the hopes that this would scare him a little--but it did not. He was not even slightly nonplussed when she pointed out that if he was a Colombian drug dealer, why did caller ID show he was in Jamaica? He became increasingly belligerent and aggressive.
He sounded stoned, and anyone that would try a scam like this would have to be stoned.
The sad thing is I wonder how many suckers he ends up fleecing.....it doesn't take many to make it profitable!
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