Ah, they grow up so fast.

[bigred]

Or you could take the other approach and string them along with false info. There was a guy online years ago who called himself the "Ebola Monkey Man" and had a whole web site where he documented how well he did this with many scammers at the time...some of the stupid stuff he got them to believe or do because they thought they were going to make money off of him was great. I rarely get scam calls or emails these days, but I think the next time I do I'll try this.

 

[Darat]

There is meant to be a new variant using AI - they use someone's "Sorry can't answer my phone at the moment, leave a message and I'll get back to you" answerphone message to train an AI voice generator that sends the "Hi lost my phone" as a voice message to WhatsApp. I can see how that would get around most of the doubts about authenticity. But I'm dubious that is making the rounds as a real scam, it would require too much effort and cost and the WhatsApp texts are all a numbers game.

Might be too expensive for the regular bods but not for the nationals:

AI-cloned voice of 999 call handler used in Russian disinformation operation

www.independent.co.uk