I knew it. This had to happen. The trigger happy Mishra ji is always clicking on dubious links. I have told him so many times not to even open mails coming from anyone pretending to be Nigerian, but he doesn’t care. To his credit, this time the sender was from Cameroon, so Mishra ji was a sitting duck. Now he has lost control of his laptop and the Cameroonian is asking for $2000 to release it. Mishra ji still owes me Rs 200o from the last time I repaired his laptop, fat chance he is going to pay $2000 to anyone.
Now he is asking me to visit his house and rescue him. But I don’t know anything about recovering hacked laptops. I know a little bit about everything, but not too much of anything. Moreover, he is better off formatting the piece of junk which is worth Rs 15,000 at best. But wait. Let me pull a fast one on him. Mishra ji is totally tech illiterate. He knows diddly squat about technology. I will simply tell him I recovered the laptop but lost the data. He won’t know the difference. And I will charge him Rs 2000 for it.
‘Recovery’ update
Apparently Mishra ji has consulted his daughter Malini, also known as Baby (irrelevant detail), who has advised him to format the laptop since he has no important data in it. Damn it. Now the stingy man will pay me only for formatting.
Visit Update
Buwahahaha. I got in touch with the hacker. He told me Mishra ji’s surfing history was with him, which he would share with his wife if he didn’t pay up. Mishra ji is tech illiterate but not stupid. He asked me how the hacker knows who his wife is. I told him that the hacker has also gotten access to Facebook from the laptop and added her as a friend. Now he can send her anything. For the moment Mishra ji is more concerned about why his wife is adding random foreigners as friends. But he has agreed to pay Rs 10,000 in all, of which the Cameroonian has agreed to let me keep Rs 2000. All’s well that ends well.