Mastodawn

justthisguyyouknow Jul 31, 2024

That is genius!

Update:

LOL, someone reported me to, err, me... The first report I have ever had!

Seems I have to clarify.

All junk calls I get, are either not legal under PECR, or actually fraudulent. I am assuming this is the nature of this call. If not, then not so funny.

I have zero sympathy for someone that works for criminals. Arguing that the only job you can get is working for criminals does not justify it. Sorry. But that is my free speech opinion.

So I won't be suspending myself.

Anyia, geeky 🏳️‍⚧️ girl Jul 31, 2024

@revk that gave me a good laugh, thanks! 😂

Esme Ciredutemps Jul 31, 2024

@revk c'est nul

flag_genderfluid

@ciredutempsEsme @revk un gros move de connard.

Robbert Jul 31, 2024

wait, there are callcenters who don't (re)configure their phone systems with network settings?

phone was acting weird -> factory reset and the network did the rest.

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk I'm not sure you understand how much stress this person has put on a delocalized worker, who's already alienated in normal conditions, having to follow a route made by white collar workers. He may have a family to feed and he isn't the problem himself. He may have been fired, or at best he's lost an hour of paid labor while fearing losing his job, in great distress.

This is only funny for ignorant people, and there's arguably racism in that. Do better.

@oceane I'd only do it to someone that is a an unlawful junk caller - which is most of them - and I would assume such in this case.

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk This is unlawful in your country, not in theirs. This person has a job contract. There's no need to be rude with them actually – I generally politely tell them that I'm broke, that I dont own my home, that I'm going to switch to an associative ISP but that their employer is great, and then they leave me alone.

In the worst case, I've asked them to tell me who had given them my contact info, I had to contact them thrice and threaten them to file a GDPR complaint if I didn't have my answer, and then the female worker has somehow negociated not to call me anymore in exchange of not giving me this information, and they didn't call me on behalf of their client since 2022. I was telling her all along the way that I didn't mean to harm her but that this really was about another data broker, but she was stressed anyway.

Your "I'd only do it to someone that is an unlawful junk caller" looks like a coded way to say "I wouldn't do that to a white worker from a national call center"…

Marcos Dione Jul 31, 2024

@revk @oceane the telemarketer is the company, not the person calling. They're doing tht shitty job because they hve no other option. I worked in a call center and none of the positions are an easy or rewarded job: sales, cold callers and support.

piofthings Jul 31, 2024

@oceane @revk I don’t buy the racism trope here. I know these junk callers! They know what they are doing! Yes they get paid a salary, but they are not all harmless! They are part of a well connected mafia! Some of these “call centres” are setup in Govt. mandated “IT Parks” with tax breaks in the respective country of origin! I may have sympathy for a homeless guy running from a mob because they got a bottle of car air freshener and took shelter in my living room! I would not if he knifed me!

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@piofthings @revk Why would I tell there could be racism here if I didn't believe it? My other points can stand for themselves. Why are you reacting to this specifically?

piofthings Jul 31, 2024

@oceane @revk because I am a brown guy who doesn’t want racism to be used for defending criminals!

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@piofthings @revk I felt that but don't you agree that white people performatively ruining a call operator's day would be performing white supremacy?

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@piofthings @revk This message is part of a collection of online messages in which you can see white people harming people with thick accents, in an attempt not to get called again. These operators don't get to make a choice; their supervisors do, so you need to tell them it's completely pointless wasting resources calling you to get their staff complimented, or to legally threaten them under the GDPR or under California's CCPA Act.

piofthings Jul 31, 2024

@oceane given there was no mention of dialect, language, or country of origin for that call it is extremely presumptuous! Could have been a call from the same country, east European country or anywhere else! Also these scammers don’t distinguish between colour of skin! They started with national level scamming operations before they went international! So, I appreciate you being cognisant of racism, I simply disagree that needs to be at play here!

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@piofthings Indeed, but I think that when most white people think about a call center, they either think about trusted services like energy or their government (that foreign scammers, as organizations, are impersonating) or about the scammers themselves, perceived as brown people.

Nangpa 🇳🇴Jul 31, 2024

Maybe I can't read, but the topic here is not skin colour, nationality or race - not even close...
So, I don't see the racism issue

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@Nangpa @revk Because this kind of call center is often abroad, and because the call operators are often PoC.

Nangpa 🇳🇴Jul 31, 2024

Sorry, @oceane

Fediverse is worlwide with people/users from around the globe and we can't be too "woke" all the time.

I don't mind "woke" people but this got nothing to do with this post by @revk

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@Nangpa @revk Indeed but speaking as a white person I can tell you without a shadow of doubt that when white people think about call center scams they think about brown people. If harming a call center scammer is harming a brown person, then this post is embedded in a racist culture and in racist practices. I didn't say that revk was racist, and I have the luxury not to have to jump to conclusions. I'm just saying, I will repeat, that "there's arguably racism in that".

24😷-185 Jul 31, 2024

@oceane @revk @Nangpa There are call centres in India who make fradulent calls to English-speaking elderly people about their computer.

They are brought down by hackers because Indian authorities won't do anything and are often bribed by local politicians.

The bosses make hundreds of money by selling inefficient computer protections. The cold-callers barely hide their joy when they see a well-fed bank account and when they are caught about lying about their identity, they resort to insults.

Are you seriously suggesting that nothing should be done against that because that would be considered as racism!?

@240185 @oceane @Nangpa I was not considering race at all.

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk @240185 @Nangpa (I didn't mean to imply you did. I said there was "arguably racism in that [i.e., in the context in which this message was written and shared]".)

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk @240185 @Nangpa You should understand that there's an historical precedent here with neo-Nazi instances leveraging "free speech" as an excuse. You probably aren't aware of it, but your update feels even more [in]appropriate than the image itself for this reason.

[Sorry for the belated typo fix]

@oceane @240185 @Nangpa Sorry to hear that - I am puzzled it has now got in to race, which was not in the original post at all. Indeed, I rarely get calls that don't sound like they are in the UK, but that was not my consideration at all in the post.

Junk/fraud calls are a plague on us all, and this post was an amusing rebalancing of the nuisance caused by them.

What of all the people on low wages trying to make a living who are interrupted by junk callers.

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@240185 @revk @Nangpa Absolutely not! But are you sending this message in the context of national Indian calls, with (1) based on what you say, lacking legal resources due to political corruption, and (2) from my point a view, a negligible number of elderly white people?

I'm saying here that sharing this kind of messages on social media is embedded in racism, and that racism isn't a solution, it's part of everyone's problems with crime, scamming, and so on, because it reinforces a social system based on forcing people to contribute to it to meet their own needs (Adam Smith), and that's been coopted by a class of oppressors, that defend a system waging wars for their own benefits (e.g. natural resources appropriation, such as oil, or even as weapons manufacturers). If this is in the context of national Indian calls, then racism from white people feels irrelevant, isn't it?

I won't improvise myself an Indian activist, but I'm sure that you can find a trust-based network of local orgs in about 15 minutes by querying about any reputable search engine. Racism isn't part of the solution, but lending these orgs a hand on your spare time, sharing their press releases on your account, blogging about them would be. From the top of my head, these would be the solutions I would suggest in this context.

24😷-185 Jul 31, 2024

@oceane @revk @Nangpa I was writing the message thinking about international calls, targetting people in UK or United States from India. But the points you raised are valid, although I wouldn't consider the ratio between the amount of money fraudulently obtained and the number of victims as "negligible".

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@240185 @revk @Nangpa Sure, but then I would encourage you to join local data protection activists. It's all fun and games until you ask which data broker has sold them your contact info.

No need to hurt anyone.

@oceane @240185 @Nangpa That gets you nowhere - they just hang up!

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk @240185 @Nangpa Threatening them to sue them if they did has worked in the single case I did this. They've indeed hanged up twice, then I've threatened them, then they got concerned.

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk @240185 @Nangpa Again, abusing people doesn't disrupt the workplace because it's already a sweatshop built around disciplinary measures.

@oceane @240185 @Nangpa OK but *any* measure that works, and gets the place shut down causes those workers to all be out of a job, probably without being paid.

Doing the right thing and getting the bad guys sorted out causes people to lose their jobs.

The trick is not to work for criminals and scammers in the first place.

@oceane @240185 @Nangpa I'm impressed. The fraud ones don't have anyone to sue - you don't get any identity of who they are. The junk calls are crap at identifying themselves, I have tried hard on occasion to just get a company name that is not made up. *if* I played along enough to get as far as paying something, maybe I could identify who I paid somehow. But until then, who do you sue.

Well done making progress. But it is a battle, which is the point of the original post.

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk @240185 @Nangpa In my case they were contacting me on behalf of SFR, a crappy French ISP, so I could just have sued them.

Oh and I was recording the call.

@oceane @240185 @Nangpa I record all calls anyway, but I have had the odd case like that and the company they name obviously deny any wrong doing.

They may, for example, have some sort of referral or commission system, but have in no way authorised or requested junk calls, so why would they care?

I appreciate laws vary on this.

But if you win the nice way, people still lose jobs!

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk @240185 @Nangpa I didn't say it would be a bad thing, I said abusing workers was a bad way to do this. They aren't the enemy. Their employer is.

@oceane @240185 @Nangpa And to be clear, some of them, especially those working for fraudsters, know exactly what they are doing and have chosen to do, so I see no reason they are "not the enemy" too.

There are those working in a call centre that does sell something vaguely legit even if it fails to follow the rules on junk calls. Those people may not appreciate what they are doing until someone explains it (which I do).

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk @240185 @Nangpa I'm sorry but I've only done it once, with the intent of suing the data broker, not the call center. It was a mistake and I won't do this again.

However, there's a difference between this and breaking a sweatshop worker's tools for about an hour, which feels cruel and gratuitous to me. The person has actually lost some of their free time to laugh at a dark-skinned Indian. As I replied to some people denying the racism I was feeling in the cultural context surrounding this post, white people were, indeed, thinking about delocalized PoC.

Other solutions include mandatory phone number prefixes and then apps like AnyCallBlocker IIRC, or training elderly people not to give their bank/insurance credentials over a phone call. The EU has made MFA mandatory for online payments, and so forth.

Part of these solutions include being part of the safety net we're probably voting for, and then getting an actually leftist government training elderly people over deconcentrated, local, convenient, free workshops, in small groups.

There are solutions. None of them imply getting a sweatshop worker worried. I was just saying that this one, as ad hoc as it was, was more efficient. This was a personal, slightly bootlegged personal experience. That was the point.

@oceane @240185 @Nangpa Why does everyone have to make things about race, where in the original post did anyone say "dark-skinned Indian"? You are creating a straw man, if I have my false arguments right.

Nangpa 🇳🇴Jul 31, 2024

Just ignore tiling that doesn't agree with your post - this is just too stupid. You start a thread with a topic and suddenly it's about something completely different. 🙄

@oceane @240185

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk @240185 @Nangpa No absolutely not; I repeat, I did not mean to imply anything about your intent. I'm a very literal person.

Some people have come into my mentions to deny that there would be racism in the post of which you shared a screenshot, or in the way this post would circulate among white people. Whether it makes Indian people laugh about their own national call center staff is another question. And then someone has come into my mentions about half an hour ago to tell me that there were poorly regulated call centers in India, whose legal owners would corrupt politicians, scamming impoverished elderly people in the US and in the UK, whose workers would be happy to have a nice pay.

This is a very interesting digression topic but for now it just confirms that this topic involves States with hierarchical relationships, a hierarchy which is based on racism, if anything as the mere association of these States to ethno-racial and (perceived) moral traits, involving perceived forms of productivity and work ethics. When white French tourists say during a tour in India that all of our IT industry is there, this is probably deliberate, thought-through antiracism on the field. Anyway, people associate States with morphologies and perceived moral traits. Associating call centers to Southern States is racist in itself so these memes could be considered as dogwhistles.

Please note that free software activists have an extremely – for activists – misogynistic and racist culture. We're sharing blog posts from people who've compared Islam to Nazism or to satiric religions on their blogs in most otherwise decent places, including XMPP chatrooms about permacomputing; and even if I've never seen these blog posts actually shared there, they would be barred from any other activist space, for good reasons, until they would edit and retract, or delete these posts. Our treatment of Stallman's attempt at raping a 14 years-old female teenager is also telling: every activist to whom I've asked their opinion has told me without a second of hesitation that this man was disgusting, and that they absolutely wouldn't want to be around someone tolerating him, but even in the Guix chatroom I was "well, maybe this was a misunderstanding, but even then it was a sexual assault".

This post is nerdy as fuck, and I welcome this, but it warrants extra caution IMO

Caoilte O'Connor Jul 31, 2024

@oceane @240185 @Nangpa I read this as an accusation of racism against @revk - i think it's understandable that he found it upsetting.

"However, there's a difference between this and breaking a sweatshop worker's tools for about an hour, which feels cruel and gratuitous to me. The person has actually lost some of their free time to laugh at a dark-skinned Indian."

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@revk @240185 @Nangpa Because the French law requires us to inform people they're recorded (including by e.g. CCTV cameras) that's how I was starting my call. Then "if you hang up, I'll sue you", "give me the name of the data broker", and the call operator probably started to feverishly look up diagrams.

@oceane @240185 @Nangpa So you got some low paid worked anxious and worried about his job because they have had to hand over details that could get the company sued (and recorded their side as well I am sure)... So "abusing a worker", the very thing you don't want to do.

And if you succeed in suing then they lose the job.

There is no nice way to sort this out, and breaking their phone for a bit is no worse.

tyx Jul 31, 2024

@oceane @revk @Nangpa
You're doing the same broad assumptions as the far-right do, with zero knowledge of circumstances.
Illegal business -> POC? Really?

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@tyx @revk @Nangpa I'm telling you that white people (at least where I live, in France) do this association. We call a category of these scammers "les brouteurs" (I'm saying this because an anthropology journal at my town library has published a paper mentioning Nigerian brouteurs); I hear white people referring to other white people on Facebook/Instagram driving them mad as if it was a good joke.

What do you think? I've spent an entire day replying to people about this. I'm not doing this for internet points; most of my posts are French-speaking anyway.

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@tyx @revk @Nangpa FYI, I've got 2 new followers today. I don't spend 6 hours on my computer for 2 new followers, I have blog posts to write

tyx Jul 31, 2024

@oceane @revk @Nangpa
Ok, your goal was not a discussion, but throwing moral supremacy claims around. I'll spare you some minutes then.

Mans R Aug 1, 2024

@Nangpa @oceane @revk When white people see racism everywhere, I sometimes wonder if it might actually be a reflection of their own attitudes.

Nangpa 🇳🇴Aug 1, 2024

Totally agree👍
We all need to take a look in the mirror 😉

Océane Aug 1, 2024

@Nangpa @mansr @revk You definitely should try to write documents of an arbitrarily long format, for example with Markdown and the Zola static sites generator. Emacs provides a complete framework for this (Irreal and planet.emacslife.com are good entry points) but it's a mess to setup so if you were to choose this route, you would be feel free to ask me anytime for technical advice.

Short formats and especially on remote, shared databases that you can't export are both dispositives of power in Foucault's sense. These are red flags. You should get into blogging in a sane, safe context and then consider the questionable opportunity of getting into microblogging.

To answer to this ad hominem argument, of course I'm projecting; I know that as long as children with my profile (a neurodivergent white trans woman) won't be safe, nobody will, not even oppressors. I want to be part of the safety net I'm voting for.

Indeed, I know as a white person that PoC are more vulnerable and less prone to defend themselves aggressively from verbal aggressions. Whiteness includes tools to punish them for setting and enforcing boundaries – as do school bullying and adulthood. I've actively built the habbit of not reacting aggressively to PoC signaling boundaries or even misbehaving in the most harmless way, especially by considering how I would react with a white person.

I understand this is an ad hominem argument but this isn't based on any form of knowledge. You can't just jump on someone else's feelings as an excuse to tone police me. This would require at least some form of violence that might be culturally implied by what I say, and I'm sorry for this, I know I'm not careful enough about that, but that (as a form of violence) just isn't on my mind.

Irreal | The minds had long ago come up with a proper name for it; they called it the Irreal, but they thought of it as Infinite Fun. That was what they really knew it as. The Land of Infinite Fun. –Iain M. Banks, Excession

Catarina Lourenço Jul 31, 2024

@oceane @revk he could have just pressed 9 at the start of the call, but he had to ruin someone's day instead for Internet points :/

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@Catarina @revk Indeed, this reminds me this Mad Men scene…

Twobiscuits🚴‍♂️

Cold calling is illegal. And then there are actual scam calls – and these have reached a prevalence that makes me reluctant to answer the phone to an unknown number. Which isn’t great since I am a freelancer and have no way of knowing whether it's a potential client trying to contact me? This is criminal activity that's messing with the functioning of essential infrastructure. Personally I wouldn't take the call. But fucking with their systems is ok afaic.

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@twobiscuits Did you read me carefully? Indeed, messing with their systems is OK, especially by legally threatening their employers. Putting someone who, I will repeat, does a sweatshop job on the brink of losing it isn't.

Twobiscuits🚴‍♂️

@oceane Ok if I ever have a burglar, I must remember to help them find what they're looking for in case the gang doesn't pay them …

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@twobiscuits Is burgling a systemic problem? I do not think it is. It is at most a reaction to systemic problems (such as the defunding of our public school systems, too long work weeks increasing joblessness + a too low minimum wage, or a lack of resources for hospitals and psychotherapy; a lack of family subventions; and so forth).

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@twobiscuits If I was presented with the choice of losing my Nintendo Switch or letting a teenager get abused by their schoolmates, however, since this is closer to the topic at hand, I'd assure them that they could get away with my Switch then I'd bake some pancakes.

I'm a bit virtue-signaling here, but this is just a gaming tablet. I'm 28 years old.

Océane Jul 31, 2024

@twobiscuits I mean honestly, I could get rid of my Switch for much less than that. I could get rid of it on a whim. I could forget it at a remote hotel chest and consider it lost without giving a shit. It isn't people. It's a game.

I can hardly see something that would have enough value at my place to let people get hurt. So honestly this is a bad example.

Kattenpööt 🕊️ 🏳️‍🌈Jul 31, 2024

Thank you for providing me with an example for straw man fallacy.