This is a true story. Some minor details are changed deliberately.
The dame walked into my office, and I put down my scotch with a bang; I’d seen the type before – trouble. She had that worried look that comes across as vulnerability, mixed with enough anger to blow the door off a bank vault. The long bias-cut evening gown was totally out of place for a friday morning at a gumshoe’s office. The door, with its gold leaf logo, “Spade Connector and Short Circuit, Consultants” slammed and she didn’t even jump.
No, that’s not right. Actually, it was a late-night text message, “can I call you?” I always worry when I get those, especially at 3:00am. I used to get a lot of calls at 3:00am.
We talked. It turned out that one of her neighbors had decided that she was a Bad Person and had left a couple of weird letters in her mailbox and her phone would ring sometimes at night. We ran through the threat model to try to assess whether there was real danger, or just annoyance. We concluded there was no real danger – besides, she was moving out of town in a couple of weeks. We got off the phone.
I called her back the next morning. I had gotten a scam-spam email (a Nigerian bank scam) and it gave me an idea. So, we conspired a bit, she gave me the neighbor’s name, and I did some research and for a couple of months after that, whenever I got a scam-spam, I would reply with something mildly surrealistic such as:
Oh! I am very interested in this opportunity! I am, however, being in the middle of a divorce, so I greatly need the capital – your timing is excellent. Since my divorce, I have attorneys that can subpoena my email inbox; it is not a secure communications medium. Please contact me on [+1 XXX-XXX-XXXX] between the hours of midnight and 3:00am eastern standard time when I am home and my wife is usually asleep. When I answer the phone, you can authenticate to me by saying: “Hello are you the creepy guy?” if I say “The swallow flies at midnight” then it is me. Otherwise, the call is being monitored.
I did a variety of replies like that, and sometimes I got replies from the scam-spammers, saying that they had tried to call and wanted to make sure I had given them the right number. So I gave them the neighbor’s cell phone number and said “try me tonight.”
Eventually, my friend was so amused by the whole thing that she began to wonder if it was working – there wasn’t really a good way to tell – so she used a hotel phone to call the former neighbor and see how they were faring. The annoying neighbor immediately began screaming abuse into the phone and hung up.
One of the strategies of cyberinsurgency is to find two things that annoy you, and set them upon each other.
“I always worry when I get those” – by the way, giving good diagnostics is a crucial life skill. When texting something like “can I call you” it’s not a bad idea to give information that prevents the recipient from worrying: “Everything is OK, but can we talk?”
Hahahahaha!!! *laughs evilly*
I like this.
It sounds like the neighbor wasn’t very smart. Such stuff must be done in such a manner that the victim cannot figure out who is the person hurting/annoying them.
That sounds clever. Hmm, I wonder whether there’s a way how set somebody annoying upon American cops.
Don’t mess with Marcus (or friends of Marcus), or you will be set on in clever and creative ways. :D Great strategy, I like it.
Oh I like it!
This does raise the question how much internet traffic is wasted daily on spambots spamming each other either deliberately (e.g. by being set on each other by gritty PIs) or “accidentally” through each group harvesting the other’s contacts. It’s the internet of bad things and it’s probably been around a lot longer than the internet of regular things.
—
It just occured to me that whenever in science fiction a dead civilisation and it’s still running computer systems are discovered, that’s probably exactly what the latter are doing: Spamming each other until the local star explodes. “Captain, it seems these computers are still operational. It would appear they’re trying to move some inherited capital and require the assistance of someone living in the northern hemisphere to faciliate the process. Fascinating!”
P.S.: While I wouldn’t wish spammers – especially the phone variety – on anyone turnabout is fair play.
In a similar vein: A few years ago, my establishment had A-Z pigeon-hole postboxes for official and personal correspondence – totally open for anyone to deliver stuff and take out their own stuff.
Honesty was enough to keep the system working fine for everyone. Except me: I had some with a similar surname regularly opening my post, putting it back ripped open, and on a couple of occasions leaving a little taunting note inside. Totally brazen, no excuse, no defence, and as far as I was concerned, without any animosity between us. We had no friends in common or anything but we just had different circles. I was perplexed.
But it went on for weeks, and I asked them nicely a few times not to do it.
Eventually I got sick of this low-grade pointless harassment. I got hold of some headed note-paper for the establishment, and made a couple of letters, post-dating one of them and addressed them to me. The first one said that the establishment was aware I had brought the matter to their attention, repeated in detail in the letter, and had called in the miscreant for a formal interview (dated the week before). The second letter again described the harassment in detail, and added that the miscreant had failed to turn up to the formal interview and therefore the establishment’s formal process of dismissal, without any further appeal was now already taking place.
The letters were placed in the pigeon hole.
The miscreant returned from leave…
…and opened them both.
I can only imagine what happened next: I never saw the letters again, even though they were addressed to me. But the establishment called me in and asked me if I had written the letters, which (thanks to a couple of friends) I could say truthfully that I had not. The miscreant had taken the letters, with all the details of his misdeeds, straight to the very people he thought were in process of kicking him out without any chance of appeal.
Hoisted deliciously on his own petard, he never gave me any trouble ever again.
Vandals spray-paint “Pay your bill Donna” on man’s house – and he has no idea why
I used to reply like that but the phone number i would give the scammer was to the Portland Oregon office of the FBI. Good times ensued Im sure.
StonedRanger@#7:
I used to reply like that but the phone number i would give the scammer was to the Portland Oregon office of the FBI. Good times ensued Im sure.
The FBI has no sense of humor, though. I checked.
Ieva Skrebele@#1:
It sounds like the neighbor wasn’t very smart. Such stuff must be done in such a manner that the victim cannot figure out who is the person hurting/annoying them.
Not smart at all. Apparently the whole thing kicked off because she mowed her lawn wearing a bikini, and the guy started yelling stuff at her. Then the harassing phone calls started, etc. He also spent a lot of time watching her come and go to work, and glaring out the window.
I did not want to get in a situation where I started messing with someone who was not actually a problem. Then, that would be a very confused dude indeed.