OPINION: On Friday I made a terrible error of judgement.
I received a text, quite clearly a scam, saying ‘Hi mum, phone just crashed and won’t turn on anymore. Please send me a Whatsapp message on my old one’ followed by a number.
Now I’ve heard enough tales of heartbreak or near misses with these pricks taking advantage of people - often older people or parents genuinely worried for their kids.
So in what seemed like a good idea at the time to just kind of waste their time and trick them back I unthinkingly decided to troll the troll. Scam the scammer.
And for a minute it was kind of satisfying knowing that these peddlers of misery thought they were going to get a sweet sweet payload but that I was then going to whisk the rug from under them, make them feel a bit stink - an iota of how they make those they take advantage of feel, but a bit stink none-the-less.
But when the gig was up it turned dark real, real fast. Suddenly my son with the broken phone was calling me a stupid ho* and threatening all sorts of hideousness.
"Someone wills tab you," the scammer texted.
"Or shoot you.
"Ive got your face,
"Name,
"IP address,
"Everything."
Screenshots of the scammer texting Tova O'Brien.
So like I said, it escalated fast and got pretty dark.
And for a moment it freaked me out. I was at home alone at the time. A quick google search suggested yes scammers could get my IP address from WhatsApp or messenger and other clumsy searches seemed to suggest they might be able to get my actual address from that.
I didn’t want to be stabbed or shot but I didn’t really know what to do.
And most of the advice I found suggested fortifying myself from scammers proactively, not replying or clicking on anything suspicious.
Well, I’d already messed that up.
So while I await my fate and learn the damage from my one-time scamming scammer experiment let this serve as a lesson.
While I doubt many of you will be as daft as I was - please allow me to make these mistakes so you don’t have to.
Don’t troll the trolls, and don’t scam the scammers. It won’t be long before the son you never knew you had or wanted is calling you a stupid birch.
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