![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Your 'open' sign is blinking still.
Feb. 8th, 2008 11:25 amI totally just fell for a phone scam. I'm so not usually this person, I mean, who among us are, really, if we're here, right? So I get a call and the caller ID says "prison" and its a local number. I pick up, thinking, this might be a client's of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dommeyourass. There's a long message, saying this number is listed as an emergency contact, please hold, then a bunch of other instructions, mostly in spanish, even though I hit zero to get it in english. Then it ends and I hear a guy say "hello?" and I say, "I think you have the wrong number" and he says, "why do you say that, sir?" And he's exceedingly polite and says he's sheriff blah blah blah and do I know someone who would list this number for their emergency contact? He needs me to call the lieutenant on duty and talk to him. Ok, so now I'm freaking out. Because 3 years ago, I would be suspicious, but given that now my partner works for the county and goes to the jails frequently, I'm totally eating it all up. Like, the procedure seemed shady for just a regular accident, but if there was some complicated 'incident' in court, I could totally see getting some strange call from a sherriff to call someone else. He asks if I have a pen, I'm all like, oh yeah, of course, can you speak up please? And then he tells me to call this "extension" number and it starts with *72 and I think that's odd of course, but I have so much adrenaline in my bloodstream that I'm not thinking clearly. I call the number and get some weird message saying call could not be completed as dialed. I call the number without the weird extension and get some cell phone with a pop song ringback. I call 311 and explain the situation, that I'm trying to reach a mysterious "Lt. Garcia", they give the number to Cook County Sherrif's department. I call them and explain the situation, she says, "hold on, sir." I get transferred and explain the situation and she says, "hold on, sir". No one is asking me questions to clarify, so I assume they know what I mean, I'm getting more and more freaked out, until finally the last person interrupts my story and says, "sir, this is a scam that's been going on for awhile, its in all the papers." Um, what? How are the scamming me? She explains very fast that is a call-forwarding scam and I shouldn't call the number and I'm like, uh, too late, hence me calling you. And she's like, well, we can put a block on your phone from cook county jail, but this is a nationwide scam and they use other phones, to it might not actually block them. And I'm like, yeah, never mind, we might actually get legitimate phone calls from jail at my house. She said that in an emergency, they would never ask you to call someone else. Which, is good to know, but how would I know that before? Then she was giving me helpful advice like "don't accept collect calls from people you don't know, sir" (um, I didn't) and "don't answer the phone if you don't recognize the number". She also called me honey at one point. I hung up the phone feeling kinda foolish. But my partner is a public defender! She has clients in prison! At one point there was a chance she would be jailed for contempt! I'm not normally this gullible! But it is funny to me, that with every transferred phone call, the person on the other end was probably rolling their eyes then sending me over to the "Prey on the Weak" department, where I was interpreting each transfer as a sign of how serious the situation must be.
I then was in the middle of calling my phone company and I kept getting more and more "Prison" calls and I would answer them, because hell, I was going to tell them I was onto them. You know teach them lesson. Hahaha. Well, at least get them to not call back. But when I picked up, I wasn't getting the message or the guy again. They kept hanging up on me, then calling back a minute later. I finally did some googling and figured out that I had been tricked into activating call-forwarding so that when they called me and I DIDNT answer, it would get forwarded on and they could make as many calls as they wanted on my bill. So I deactivated call-forwarding, except that didn't seem to work, so I call my phone company and she explained that I was fine because actually, to activate call forwarding on my phone you have to dial 72#, not *72. But she's like, when you hang up, why don't you hit 73# to deactivate it just in case? So I did, and the prison kept calling me until I didn't answer and then they learned that I wasn't forwarding their calls anyway, so they will move onto some other sucker, and now its all done and I'm feeling like a foolish waste of a morning.
This is on top of me booking a hotel last night in a panicked state and then cancelling it this morning when I woke up, even though it cost me $20 to do so, because I realized I made a very bad choice, except my credit card hold is still there so I can't book the cheaper, plusher hotel I found to replace it.
Mercury retrograde, you are not helping my anxiety.
dommeyourass. There's a long message, saying this number is listed as an emergency contact, please hold, then a bunch of other instructions, mostly in spanish, even though I hit zero to get it in english. Then it ends and I hear a guy say "hello?" and I say, "I think you have the wrong number" and he says, "why do you say that, sir?" And he's exceedingly polite and says he's sheriff blah blah blah and do I know someone who would list this number for their emergency contact? He needs me to call the lieutenant on duty and talk to him. Ok, so now I'm freaking out. Because 3 years ago, I would be suspicious, but given that now my partner works for the county and goes to the jails frequently, I'm totally eating it all up. Like, the procedure seemed shady for just a regular accident, but if there was some complicated 'incident' in court, I could totally see getting some strange call from a sherriff to call someone else. He asks if I have a pen, I'm all like, oh yeah, of course, can you speak up please? And then he tells me to call this "extension" number and it starts with *72 and I think that's odd of course, but I have so much adrenaline in my bloodstream that I'm not thinking clearly. I call the number and get some weird message saying call could not be completed as dialed. I call the number without the weird extension and get some cell phone with a pop song ringback. I call 311 and explain the situation, that I'm trying to reach a mysterious "Lt. Garcia", they give the number to Cook County Sherrif's department. I call them and explain the situation, she says, "hold on, sir." I get transferred and explain the situation and she says, "hold on, sir". No one is asking me questions to clarify, so I assume they know what I mean, I'm getting more and more freaked out, until finally the last person interrupts my story and says, "sir, this is a scam that's been going on for awhile, its in all the papers." Um, what? How are the scamming me? She explains very fast that is a call-forwarding scam and I shouldn't call the number and I'm like, uh, too late, hence me calling you. And she's like, well, we can put a block on your phone from cook county jail, but this is a nationwide scam and they use other phones, to it might not actually block them. And I'm like, yeah, never mind, we might actually get legitimate phone calls from jail at my house. She said that in an emergency, they would never ask you to call someone else. Which, is good to know, but how would I know that before? Then she was giving me helpful advice like "don't accept collect calls from people you don't know, sir" (um, I didn't) and "don't answer the phone if you don't recognize the number". She also called me honey at one point. I hung up the phone feeling kinda foolish. But my partner is a public defender! She has clients in prison! At one point there was a chance she would be jailed for contempt! I'm not normally this gullible! But it is funny to me, that with every transferred phone call, the person on the other end was probably rolling their eyes then sending me over to the "Prey on the Weak" department, where I was interpreting each transfer as a sign of how serious the situation must be. I then was in the middle of calling my phone company and I kept getting more and more "Prison" calls and I would answer them, because hell, I was going to tell them I was onto them. You know teach them lesson. Hahaha. Well, at least get them to not call back. But when I picked up, I wasn't getting the message or the guy again. They kept hanging up on me, then calling back a minute later. I finally did some googling and figured out that I had been tricked into activating call-forwarding so that when they called me and I DIDNT answer, it would get forwarded on and they could make as many calls as they wanted on my bill. So I deactivated call-forwarding, except that didn't seem to work, so I call my phone company and she explained that I was fine because actually, to activate call forwarding on my phone you have to dial 72#, not *72. But she's like, when you hang up, why don't you hit 73# to deactivate it just in case? So I did, and the prison kept calling me until I didn't answer and then they learned that I wasn't forwarding their calls anyway, so they will move onto some other sucker, and now its all done and I'm feeling like a foolish waste of a morning.
This is on top of me booking a hotel last night in a panicked state and then cancelling it this morning when I woke up, even though it cost me $20 to do so, because I realized I made a very bad choice, except my credit card hold is still there so I can't book the cheaper, plusher hotel I found to replace it.
Mercury retrograde, you are not helping my anxiety.
