[SWLUG] Scam phone calls

[(s) Sally Cook]

They are pretty demanding... enough to make the Post Office owners flee across the road to have me field phone calls for them.  

I asked where did she get their home phone numbers from... she called "BT". When it was pointed out that that's illegal under the Data protection Act (BT aren't authorised to give out private numbers to external companies), I won first prize - they slammed the phone down on me.

Luckily they called back 5 mins later and told me I was a total cow.  

Nice touch - customer service at BT is improving. :)



________________________________________
From: discuss-bounces at swlug.org [discuss-bounces at swlug.org] on behalf of James Edgeworth [diagmato at black0ps.com]
Sent: 01 May 2012 10:44
To: discuss at swlug.org
Subject: Re: [SWLUG] Scam phone calls

On 25/04/2012 15:54, Dick Bain wrote:

> hehe I have just spent an hour on the phone with just such a scammer, he
> ask me to go to logmein.com <http://logmein.com> ammyy.com
> <http://ammyy.com> and support4windows.com <http://support4windows.com>
> when none of the software would load I sounded as worried as possible
> and said I was really worried about my computers. He said that they
> could fix them for a one off fee of £86.72 and would have to pay by
> card; I explained that I didn't have any cards because the bank had
> taken them away so he suggested I went to westernunion.co.uk
> <http://westernunion.co.uk> to pay but I told him I didn't know my
> account details as my mummy did all that. I was then passed to a lady
> who spoke better English but I said I wanted to speak to the nice man
> and she passed me on to another man who also spoke very good English and
> when I was unable to install the software they have offered to come to
> my house and collect the money; he read out my address and said someone
> would be in the village within the hour and I could pay him. I'm waiting
> with bated breath for developments.
>
> Oh an I did tell them the computer was running Ubuntu spelled out uncle
> baby uncle naughty teacher uncle but they still carried on!
>
> I'll let you know how things go
>
> Dick

Seems they had a meeting recently to discuss business opportunities, and
have come up with another angle.

This time a local sounding chap phoned from a "partner of BT", who
"manage the security of their network infrastructure". He requested a
direct debit of £8.99 per month to enable malware scanning on all
network traffic going through BT to our IP, and that it was a standard
BT feature which is being moved to a dedicated company. Oh, and
apparently, Eset, and other anti-virus software don't actually scan for
viruses... and "with all due respect, your son being a software
developer means he knows about software, not about network
infrastructure so he wouldn't know about anti-virus" (...what...).

Crafty. He seemed very convincing about BT, down to "as you can see on
your recent bill, you have x and y details etc etc" - someone will fall
for it unfortunately.

He was also pretty polite in the way it ended. We told him directly we
were not interested, and he gave an extension number to contact him
directly (although withheld his number...) and said that if we do change
our minds, just give him a call. The trick there is perhaps that if
someone wasn't quite sure it was a scam, then they'd think "hmm, maybe
it was genuine - oh look! They're calling back".

Makes me wonder what angle they will play next though.
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