The Scammer's Lament

"You're wasting my time..."

Mid afternoon, and the landline rings at home - always a rare and exciting event. It is Jacob from ‘Medical Health Services’ calling from what sounds like a busy call-centre. He wants to offer me a smart device designed for elderly people like me. Knowing how these things turn out, I start recording the call, as you can hear below - at a couple of points I’ve bleeped out some personal information.

Jacob tells me I can wear the device around my wrist and whenever I need medical help I can talk to it just as if it was a smartphone. Even better, it has fall detection technology built in so that if an old crumbly like me takes a tumble the device can summon help.

Asked for my date of birth, I demur at handing over more than the year, but when I reveal that I have Parkinson’s Jacob has some great news: “You are suffering from a major health condition, so you are not going to pay a single penny for this device. We are going to pay on your behalf. And not only that, we also have waived your shipping charges and activation fee.”

Great! There will just be a small charge for the monitoring service watching over me 24/7 but that’s a bargain at just £39.99 a month. He then transfers me to his senior manager ‘Noah’ so that I can be registered for this exciting offer. Things start amicably enough - I ask him where they got my name, number and address and he tells me it was from the “Retired Persons Database”. Who knew there was such a thing?

I ask where his company is based - it turns out it is in London but when I offer to pop over and meet him face to face he does not seem keen. And things turn really weird when I say that, as he has my phone number, can I have his?

H gets very cross and accuses me of wasting his time: “My time is too precious, I'm not like you.” What on earth does he mean by that? “You're retired, that's why you haven't got any job to do. That is why you're wasting my time.” Anyway, he says, he doesn’t think I could afford his product, he’s been in this business for two years and has learned to spot time-wasters like me. But wait, I thought Jacob told me it was free?

He laughs at me. “Nothing is free. What is free in this world except air?” With that he puts the phone down.

Now, this is by no means the first time I’ve wound up one of these scam callers. In 2011 I kept a man from “Microsoft” on the line for 20 minutes as he explained that my home PC was under attack. When I eventually revealed that I had a Mac, not a PC, he angrily accused me of wasting his time.

But while this is fun for me, there is a serious problem which still needs sorting out. Years ago I signed up to the Telephone Preference Service which is supposed to protect you from scam calls but Jacob and Noah from “Medical Health Services” not only got through, they knew a disturbing amount about me. That means the lucrative trade in personal data continues to defy the attempts of regulators to shut it down.

One answer is of course to give up on landlines - after all, for many of us the only calls we now get on them are from scammers. But for many elderly people in locations with poor mobile coverage their landline is still a vital resource, especially in an emergency. In any case, the crooks are now finding ways to to call mobile numbers.

A few years ago, an elderly relative lost thousands of pounds when a scammer kept her on the phone for several hours, convincing her that he was upgrading her broadband connection. You may think these scams are laughably transparent and you would never fall for them. But if they didn’t produce results those call-centres where Jacob and Noah ply their trade would go out of business - so beware.