Detail of using a telephone keypad. Shallow dof. Photo: Fotolia An amateurish telemarketing scam backfired spectacularly when Joel Mantel, a former computer technician in Ontario, turned the tables on two would-be fraudsters trying to take over his computer.
The 23-year-old from Orangeville, Ont., told the Globe and Mail he was eating dinner with family last Thursday when he got the suspicious phone call he instantly recognized as a common scam intended to hold his information hostage unless he paid up. So he did what anyone would do: he recorded the resulting conversation and posted it online.
Pretending to be an older, less adept computer user, Mantel played along as two men on the other end of the line — calling from “Microsoft” — tried to convince him his machine was hopelessly compromised. The scammers tried to direct him to a website where he would then give them remote-access control over his computer, but they were so bad at carrying out their plan they soon became agitated and hostile toward Mantel.
“Don’t try to be extra smart,” a scammer who called himself James told Mantel when he asked why Microsoft would want to access his computer.
After several painful minutes of going back and forth, Mantel decided to tell the scammers they were being recorded and that a police officer had heard the whole exchange. The police officer in this case, played by Mantel’s father, was enough to convince the men on the other end that they had bitten off more than they could chew.
“Why did you call here?” they asked lamely. “Don’t call here again!”
Mantel handed a recording of the eight-minute conversation over to the RCMP’s anti-fraud centre, who advised him to share it with others so people recognize the scam in future. According to Mantel, the remote-access ploy has been particularly common in Orangeville.
“It’s a form of blackmail I feel nobody should ever be tricked into,” he told the Globe.
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