Scammers

Another day, another few scam phone calls.  This one, however, marked a new low.

01269 849064 was the number which came up (caller display is essential these days).  After some confusion an Asian voice replied, something about my broadband.  Now in the past, if I told the caller that I knew it was a scam, the call would immediately be cut.  Don’t waste your time was the instruction.  But the chap on the other end, instead of admitting defeat, was incredibly rude, and it was me who put the phone down.

I googled the number.  I thoroughly recommend doing that.  There are sites where you can report a scam number; but you’ll probably find that it’s already there, on a forum, where you can add your own comment.  This one is apparently a racket where they try to con you into downloading software.  Very often the line is silent when you answer – too many automatic random calls for the operators to answer – which accounts for the momentary confusion when I answered.  And as people become more aware of the scam and the calls are less successful, it seems that the operators are more frustrated.  Knowing they’re untraceable they feel free to be abusive.

Those scam deafness phone calls

I know, I’ve posted about this before.  But after reaching the end of my tether this morning, I’ve discovered something.

It started with an “international” call which I decided, unusually, to answer.  A woman with an Asian accent told me it was about Microsoft Windows.  I laughed, said, “Oh good, another scam”, and cut the call.  Then I got yet another call from an outfit which calls me almost every day, despite my telling them each time not to.  They call from a local number and give a slightly different variant of who they are each time.  That means I can’t report them through TPS because you need the company name.  It’s always to do with deafness, though.  And they always protest when I say it’s a scam.  I tell them I’m TPSed, but it makes no difference.  This morning the male caller was extremely rude when I challenged him.

So I rang my phone provider, KC.  The woman I spoke to had had one of these calls herself!  The number, beginning with 29, is a leased line, she said.  Companies can lease the number and make calls from anywhere in the country which will show up as local.  They go through the phone book and don’t worry about TPS, because they know they can’t be recorded.  She didn’t hold out much hope that KC could do anything about it.

These outfits make a profit or they wouldn’t be in business.  And that means that they manage to dupe lots of people; and in this case it will be mainly elderly people.  I know the government can’t do much about the scammers abroad, but there is surely a way of stopping the thieves here.

“Congratulations!” – those wretched phone calls

We didn’t get a phone until 1969.  My mother was nervous of them, and didn’t see the need.  As soon as I was working and earning money I insisted on getting a phone installed, and within a fortnight my mother was wondering how we’d ever managed without one.

In those days you had a party line.  This meant you shared the line with at least one other household; if they were using it you couldn’t, and vice versa.  This usually worked out all right, but in 1988 I found that the party line household were deliberately leaving their phone “off the hook” so that I couldn’t use the line.  Whenever I picked up, there was the sound of their domesticity; I shouted, I even blew a whistle, but they were obviously enjoying it.  It took days before the phone company could do anything about it.

I started getting obscene phone calls.  Of course, when I dialled 1471, it was “number withheld”.  The crunch came when I got home from work to a long, obscene message on my answerphone, which I had to play before I could delete it.  I asked the phone company to block my line to anonymous calls; they warned me that it could cause problems if institutions like hospitals or the police wanted to call me, but I decided that in case of emergency they could get round it.  I did discover that some people routinely block their number even on innocent phone calls.  I was standing for election once, and a resident was very indignant that he couldn’t phone me without disclosing his number.

The next step was to go for TPS.  I was reluctant to do it, but I was getting more and more of those annoying sales calls.  Since going TPS (I don’t know how one expresses that elegantly) I’ve only had a couple of sales calls (including from my own phone provider) and I’ve been able to complain successfully about them.  But there’s one annoyance that even TPS can’t stop; the scam calls from overseas.  Your caller display shows “external call (out of area)”.  If you answer it there will be a short silence and then a female American voice kicks in with, “Congratulations!”  I rarely let it go further than that.  I’ve learned that the quickest way of dealing with it is to press the call button and then immediately press the off button.  But these calls can happen daily, often several times a day, for a week at a time.  Why are we helpless to do anything about them?  Why is it possible for these computerised crooks to cause annoyance, and real distress to vulnerable people, with nothing to stop them?  They must be making enough out of it to make it worthwhile, by inducing people to send money.  Is anything being done to trace them?