We've Been Sold!

And not long back there was this article (in the In Tech?) on Death Threat Spams coming through the emails...

Just received a call not too long ago from some Private No. Turns out to be a lass who speaks Chinese as her first language (judging by the way she addressed our first name and by how she structured her sentences), but valiantly communicated to us that she was calling from Guinness with regards to our joining some contest.

Question mark.

So this Chinese lass, Nicole, asks us if we are interested in taking part in a short survey via phone. As we were curious to find out how we got into this we agreed. Really simple questions: ethinicity, age group, drink frequency (oh dear...)...then came the clincher.

"For this survey we will also need to update your contact details, yah."
"Okay."
"Your full name?"
"[aycee]"
"Your address is [address]?"
"Correct."
"Email address is [email]?"
"Yeah."
"And your IC number is...?"
"...-silence-..."

Then she goes to string some digits that weren't our IC number at all. She stops after 4-5 digits, realizing she's made a mistake (we think she was telling us our home number probably) and then starts over...with the wrong IC number again.

Warning lights.

We turn the tables at this point, firing questions back regarding from where she's calling from, what contest are we supposed to have entered, is the data on us in hardcopy or softcopy, yahdahyahdah.

And we also asked her to repeat the name she first called us when she called. Turns out it wasn't crappy reception or lousy pronunciation, it was 'Amin'.

So...Amin has entered a Guinness contest found in some men's magazine or other. And has gotten quite a bit of our info correct?

Warning klaxons.

Enough. We told her that she's probably been given the information by some third party. We'll not be consenting to this survey nor any others, thankyougoodbyehangsup.

Retrospect: Given our handwriting, it could be that it was correct but misread after all (hah still was a good thing we only told her our first name and surname and not our full name!). But we definitely haven't been buying magazines for a long time now.