Featured Image Credit: Liubomyr Vorona/Klaus Vedfelt/ Getty
When you get a spam text or phishing attempt, it's sometimes tempting to string the scammer along for a bit - just out of sheer annoyance.
Most of us don't bother to indulge such impulses, even though we've got every right to be offended by the attempt.
X (formerly Twitter) user Maia Dunphy went viral last year for not just replying with a sassy comeback, but entering into a lengthy conversation with a scammer trying to pose as her child.
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The opening gambit from this ambitious scammer took a format that plenty of us might be familiar with, reading: "Mum I am texting you on my new phone because my old phone is broken. Could you send me a message on WhatsApp so I can text you from the new phone?"
Dunphy replies to deliberately bait the scammer into a conversation that they think will end up in profit, only to immediately start mentioning funny details, like how "Monday is the day that I go out nicking jocks off random washing lines" - all of which the scammer has to pretend sounds normal.
After all, if they don't sound like Maia's supposed child, they'll be rumbled - this continues as Maia escalates things, all the way until she mentions her kid's apparent name: 'Scammy'.
Even this isn't enough to tip off the enterprising scammer, though, who continues to ask Dunphy to make a payment of over 900 euros to cover a bill that they've apparently got coming before their banking app is reactivated.
Given that these bank details had to be deleted because they included the wrong name, it's hardly the most convincing of ploys.
Eventually, tiring of the game, Dunphy lets the scammer know that she'll be forwarding all the payment details provided to the police, at which point the mask comes off and the conversation ends pretty quickly.
While this might be a really funny way to deal with a scammer, there's no getting around the fact that some older and more vulnerable people might not have been so quick off the mark.
These scams are designed this way for a reason, so there are clearly plenty of people falling for them all the time, despite the best efforts of experts warning of the many different approaches that scam artists now take online.
With AI now starting to generate even more convincing texts for scammers, things are only getting harder to spot, too.
