Kota, Rajasthan – remember this location!

TODAY I managed to get one back at the fraudsters who operate from an Indian call centre.

Many will know about the attempts by cold callers, with an Indian accent, to tell you that you've got a problem with your (DOS-Windows) computer, that they've been contacted by your ISP, that they are Microsoft, that its a "service call" and so forth. Not everyone is able to humiliate the fraudsters by telling them truthfully they have a different kind of machine (such as a Macintosh).

Last week I had "David" call me and the next day it was "Jack". I even managed to get "Jack" to admit to me that Jack wasn't his real name. He said it was "Raoul". I said I couldn't beleive anything further he had to say.

The object was to try to trick me to buy and download malware from a website and pay £185 to an account with Axis bank. There must be many owners of DOS-Windows boxes, being unfamiliar with computing, who fall for this scam, otherwise it wouldn't be worth the while of the scammers.

The Guardian did an expose on all this some while ago.

This morning, "Janet" called. I immediately suggested that that wasn't her real name; that she was in India and that she was a Bombay fraudster. She denied she was in India and said she was in the UK.  Then I hit her with "you're not in Kota, Rajasthan are you?"

The line instantly went dead.