ah ... are you also a player at
419eater? oh what fun ...
I probably should, but I'm more of a lone wolf. Even now, I wish I could catch another one of those IRS scam callers. I was not terribly creative the last time I got one of those calls. I humored the guy until he started talking about payment options at which point I said I'm a bit cash light at the moment, and all my credit cards are overdrawn, but while we were chatting, an email popped in my box from a banker in Nigeria who told me I had some money coming to me from a long lost and recently deceased uncle. My parting words werre "I'll just send his contact details and let you take all of it so long as you sort it out among yourselves."
I feel like I could have had much more fun with that... speaking of linux, I did have a fellow call me while I was on my computer telling me I was infected with a malware. He could go online and fix it for me. I happened to have a KVM guest Windows OS running under my linux host (Gentoo at the time) where I had copies of the VM saved, so I fired it up, followed his directions and allowed him to control the system with one of the free random remote desktop/screen sharing apps/services. It was a stock Win7 install with no third party apps, no regular online use, so it was interesting when he ran his supposed virus scan (Windows explorer find) and came up with some cryptically named DLL and said this one is a known malware and even pulled up a CERT article that referenced the filename. They then offered to fix it with some security software he could install and run, for a fee. Anyway, all that time, while he was running his checks, I had a separate shell opened and started messing with the KVM process, changing the nice on it to lower its priority, running CPU and HDD intensive stuff to slow down his search etc. He kept remarking on the phone that "wow, you have a very slow computer" and "it seems to be stuck" this went on over an hour and all the while, I kept talking with small talk about his life asking if he had pets, what his favorite foods were, is he married or dating, does he have brothers, sisters, etc. because things were going so slow. Anyway, by the time he got to the point about selling the software and installing it for me, I asked him, how long it would take to install it on my slow computer ... at which point, there was silence, and then he came back after realizing it would probably take another hour+ and said, yes, maybe it's not worth doing this on this computer. I almost felt bad for him... almost.