Scam killers

By Tuesday, 18 August LXF200 had appeared in our bookshop in Pretoria, South Africa. By Thursday I had seen the letter from Harry Sales, who had wasted 20 minutes of his caller’s time. So when I got a call on Friday from a person claiming to work for Microsoft (according to his accent he hails from the Far East), I decided to spend some time with him. I am a pensioner, so my current task was not urgent. I managed to waste 30

minutes of their time! First of all, he got me to download soft3.exe from FastHeal.net. When my slow internet connection eventually completed the task, the file of 9MB simply disappeared from Nemo (I use Mint 17). Then TeamViewer_

Setup.exe caused the archive manager to issue an error message. After about 25 minutes the man disappeared and a woman took over. (I could hear many voices in the background, like from a call centre). She told me to reload the latter file, and when I told her about the error message, she got me to press Super-J. When I told her that nothing was happening, she exploded: “You are ****ing with me!” Such language! And I was really co-operating with her. Really!

During this time I told them that I didn’t know Microsoft; that I had nothing from Microsoft on my computer and I don’t know what make of computer I have, but there was a sticker on the box saying ‘Powered by Ubuntu’. I also told them that the motherboard was from Intel, I don’t have InternetExplorer and only Firefox. But he never caught on. My question is: Can anybody beat my record? FanievanderWalt, SouthAfrica.

Neil says: We shouldn’t be feeling bad for these people should we? Looks like we’ve started an LXF vendetta against cold callers.