I got briefly pitched a scammy financial service in Japanese with the flavor text including “I work at a UK bank” and while I don’t often feel sympathy for professional criminals I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone attempt a higher difficulty setting.

Probably stayed on phone longer than strictly required because his Japanese was bad enough that I did not extract the “Oh this is definitely a scam” in first 30 seconds and for obvious reasons I am tolerant of second language learners and thought problem might be me.

“Why are you on a lead list for financial services scams in Japanese?” Given that he knew my email address and phone number but not name I suspect it was routine compromise of the DB of a Japanese firm, which unfortunately are not uncommon.

And if you’re on the lead list for financial services scams in Japanese “The person is calling me from London!” reads like vaguely finance-y, they have a lot of banks, and excuses some linguistic issues and irregularity because of course foreigners are weird.

In clarity of hindsight it would have been a shorter call if I had switched into English immediately after he had said institutional affiliation but that would have been rude.

(The scamming operations already have an incredible HR problem finding people who can narrate the script in Japanese and they cannot reliably staff trilinguals at that level of the org, nor would they usually benefit from doing so because the mark is not bilingual.)

“Why did you not immediately hang up on an unsolicited call from a London number that started addressing you in Japanese.” My life has a different base rate for that than most people would expect.

In particular every few months a quirk of telephony infrastructure routes my phone calls through Narnia.