Warranty Work...

"We've been trying to reach you about your extended warranty..."

click

She hung up the phone. She'd gotten so many of these calls lately. Her phone number must have been sold to a whole new collection of scammers. It always seemed to come in batches. Calls or texts, sometimes both.

Jury duty failure to report you owe us money please pay in Target Gift Cards.
The sheriff's office calling about that bench warrant you have.
Unpaid car tolls.
The extended warranty.

The last two always made her laugh the most. She didn't even have a car. Didn't know how to drive. How could she have unpaid tolls or need to extend her car's warranty?

She wondered if these scams ever worked. They must, right? Or else they wouldn't keep doing it. She guessed if they tried 1,000 times and only got one or two hits but those one or two paid off well it was probably worth it to them.

She'd also heard that a lot of the people that are on the other end of the line are basically being held captive in foreign countries. They were victims of a scam themselves. Answering an ad for a job that paid well, better than they could get in their own town, and then once they got there having their passports taken away and sat in front of a computer and phone bank with a script. And that they had to con a certain number of people or they wouldn't get food that day.

She wasn't sure how she was supposed to feel about that. Maybe that was just a story that the scammers put out so you'd feel sympathy instead of disdain for the person on the other end of the phone. And if you felt sympathy for them then maybe you'd go ahead and send a few buck their way. Just to keep them safe. Safeish. And of course once you were marked as a soft touch they'd sell your number to other scammers to keep going. Scams within scams within scams.

She just didn't understand people like that. People who were users. Who didn't view anyone else as anything other than a mark. Someone to take advantage of. Someone to make money off of. She was glad she didn't understand those people, but it still bothered her that they did what they did.

Her phone rang again. She didn't even bother answering this time. She didn't recognize the number and knew it was just another extended warranty call. People like that were the worst.

............

"I've tried everything I can to reach her about her extended warranty and she won't respond. Emails, phone calls, postcards. I don't know what else to do."

"That's it. If they don't answer they don't answer. I know you want to help her out, but it's really up to her to take the hint. I don't know why some of them don't want the extended warranty, I mean I can see that next week she's going to blow her knee out stepping off a curb, and there is a detached retina just waiting to happen but that's not your fault. You've done all that you can."