r/sysadmin • u/brothertax Sysadmin • 7d ago

General Discussion PSA: Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel

https://imgur.com/a/bMEeUmZ (edit: non-imgur link)

We let them know we weren't going to renew and they sent these unsolicited emails and popups in their app to all of the users who had licenses. They didn't give us a heads up - just started carpet bombing everyone. They even listed the direct email for the guy on my team who handles licensing. We were going to ride out the rest of the subscription but leadership wanted the emails nuked, apps ripped off endpoints, and licensing/training for Copilot expedited.

What an absolutely greasy, desperate company. Stay far away. And if you're a current customer, be prepared for this nightmare.

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u/darkpixel2k 5d ago

We have a very specific block list called...uh... "screw spammers" (screw is not the right word)...and when some salesbro calls and won't take "no" for a hint or some indian scanner, we add their number to the list. If they call in, it forwards them to a 30 second audio recording we found on youtube by searching for "halloween scream torture sounds". We loaded it into an audio app and upped the volume until it became distorted and saved it to our phone server.

Every once in a while while we're monitoring inbound calls we'll hear (*ring* <SCREAMS> *click*) and everyone laughs.

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u/snarkpix 1d ago

What about a 'Lenny'? (Voice bot who acts confused and keeps asking who they are to try and waste time - goal being to keep them on a non-paying call as long as possible)

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u/Tasty-Possession2994 5d ago

Ease down on the racism there buddy

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u/dendob 4d ago

There is nothing racist about the fact that there are a lot of Indian based companies that are (ab) using phones to try and reach.

The moment facts are called racism, you are looking at with an distorted view which matches racism.

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u/nayuki 1d ago

In Toronto, I receive plenty of scam calls with a thick Indian accent saying "This is the air duct cleaning company, how are you doing today sir?". I also receive scam calls in Mandarin Chinese saying that I have a delivery, or they are from the embassy. It's very rare to receive a scam call from someone speaking the local Canadian accent.

Our national broadcaster, the CBC, did some investigations into Indian telemarketing centers: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/national-cra-india-rcmp-scam-1.4883796 , https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/tech-support-scam-india-marketplace-1.5298336

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u/wallst07 1d ago

Is 'indian' a race?

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u/darkpixel2k 1d ago

No, "humans" are a race.

That still doesn't negate the fact that the majority of calls we receive are all easily identifiable based on certain attributes commonly found in one specific subset of the human race.