Spamming the spammers?

Every now and then I take a look at one or two of my spam emails, and last night was one such occasion.

One of the emails was the usual “I have millions of dollars from the bank account of a deceased person and want you to help me move it” email, except it had quite a difference, this one was supposedly from Simon Renaud who told me:

My name is Simon Renaud. I work with the Private Banking Division
At Leadenhall Bank Limited, London. We are conducting a standard
process investigation in relation to matters involving a client who
sharesthe same name as yours (Kristoph) and also the circumstances
surrounding investments made by this client at our bank.

Simon then went on to make vague threats about being the next of kin or else. I ignored this email.

The next spam email I decided to read told me that I had won an international lottery, and I should ring a phone number to claim my prize. I decided to fire up Skype and make the phone call, this not only masks my real location and is much cheaper, but also makes it appear to the call recipient that I am in their local area.

When I dialled the number, they answered the phone with the name of the company in the email, I muted the microphone and listened to them yelling “hello, hello, hello” followed by something in another language which sounded like “gwizkjcrizkm” before they hung up. As these were annoying spammers I decided to continue, and rang them again, which resulted in a similar response.

The third time around I found an MP3 of people talking and played that to the spammer, the spammer seemed confused by this as he kept asking them to “slow down”. I decided to ring again and this time delivered a message of “stop sending spam”, the spammer replied with “what?”, I repeated the message and received a rather pleasant message of “F*** off”.

I decided to ring again with silence and this time heard a conversation taking place in the background, I clearly heard them saying “I think it’s the police”, they did not hang up the phone on this occasion, so I hung up and tried calling a couple more times, but my call was diverted to voicemail. Hopefully this taught the spammers a lesson.

Sometimes it can be quite amusing to see how spammers respond to someone playing their game, however I did find my scam holiday conversation ^[1] much more interesting than the spammers I encountered last night.