"Illegal activity on your broadband account"

When lockdown began, I noticed a significant decrease in the number of unsolicited phone calls I was receiving. Like almost everyone else on the planet who owns a mobile phone or has a landline, I’ve become used to one or the other of them ringing from time to time and, upon answering it, being greeted by some opening remarks that can only preface a junk, or scam call. During lockdown, they stopped.

 

Now that lockdown has started to ease, the calls have started again; presumably the call centres where the calls originate from have begun reopening (no home working for their workers, obviously).

 

There is a fairly wide variety of scam, junk, fraud, or nuisance calls (call them what you will) in addition to the phishing emails and text messages that arrive periodically. A good many years ago I registered our home landline with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), which cuts out a lot of the cold calls, but not all of them. The TPS website can be found at https://www.tpsonline.org.uk/

 

At one point we were getting three or four calls a week, usually seemingly harmless calls purporting to be surveys. Without exception, there was an actual human being at the other end of the line, and I used to make it my business to so thoroughly piss them off that they would hang up before I did; on one occasion I was even accused of wasting their time. As I pointed out, it was they who had rung me, not the other way round.

 

I like to think that I am sufficiently sceptical to not be taken in by the scam callers, although as I recounted in a previous blog, I was once taken off guard by someone purporting to be from BT and revealed rather more personal information than was wise. That was a question of being hit at the right (or rather, wrong, time) and proved to me how easy it is to get scammed. Fortunately, no harm was done, and I still have no idea what the purpose of the call was. That call proved to me that when people blame victims of scams for their naivety, they may well be being unreasonable. It can happen to anyone.

 

Almost without exception, the calls I now get on my mobile are of the “We understand you have been involved in an accident that wasn’t your fault,” nature. These all start with a recorded introduction these days, and I refuse to engage with them, just hang up and block the caller’s number. I’m not sure that blocking numbers has any effect though, since all the calls seem to come from different numbers that have presumably been spoofed.

 

I know that there are apps to block calls from withheld numbers or numbers not in your phone’s contact list, but I do receive genuine calls from such numbers, so this would have the effect of me not getting calls I do want to receive.

 

Considering their apparent frequency, I have yet to receive either a call purporting to be from Windows/Microsoft telling me that my computer has some sort of virus, or one of the courier fraud calls. We did get one of the Amazon Prime scam calls recently. I was out of the house at the time, and Val took the call which works by telling the victim that a fraudster has impersonated them to sign up to Prime. The caller then claims that they need remote access to the victim’s computer to fix a security flaw. Val phoned me when she received the call, and I was sufficiently sceptical to tell her to hang up (I hadn’t heard of the specific type of fraud, but it just sounded wrong.) We had a further similar call a week or so later, so I hung up and touch wood, have not had any more.

 

Last week we started getting plagued by automated calls from a series of unusual numbers – and some withheld numbers – that start with a recorded message claiming that action is needed on our part to prevent our broadband from being disconnected within 24-48 hours due to illegal activity on the account. We had six of these calls in just two days, and by some bizarre coincidence, when the first one came in, our desktop computer decided to spontaneously shut down, which spooked Val sufficiently for her to give some credence to the call. Given that we get very, very few legitimate calls on our landline I turned the handset to silent. Genuine callers could leave a voicemail.

 

Clearly these calls are nothing more than a scam, designed to either obtain bank details, either by asking for a one-off payment to maintain your account, or aimed at gaining remote access to your computer. Either way, the most appropriate response is obviously simply to hang up. Enough people are sufficiently taken in or are scared enough to follow through on the call, and if you think it can’t happen to you, think again. You might not be taken in by this one, but at some point you may well get a call that catches you unaware, or as I was with the supposed call from BT years back, gets you just at the right time. In the same way that security services have to get it right all the time, and terrorists only need to get it right once, so it is with the scam calls.

 

 

Since scammers are now adept at spoofing telephone numbers, when your phone rings and the caller claims to be your bank, or your internet provider, or anyone with whom you have dealings, the number displayed that they are ringing from is no proof, nor even a guide, that that is the number calling you. I have long felt that just as your bank or internet provider require you to identify yourself when you call them, so they ought to have to confirm that they are who they say they are when they call you. If your bank calls you, it is normal practice for them to take you through security questions so they know that the person answering the phone is the account holder, but only by deliberately getting one wrong would you have any inkling that the caller wasn’t genuine. And, as I have found out, if you do so, they rightly won’t proceed with the call (although you do at least know it was genuine!)

 

What I would like to see is a system whereby when you set up telephone banking, or create an account with an internet service provider, or your mobile phone network, that along with the password and security questions that enable them to identify you, a reciprocal system is put in place where you give them a different password which, when they call you, they have to provide to prove that yes, it is your bank, or ISP, or whoever. It probably wouldn’t be fool proof, but it would be a lot better than nothing, which is what we have now.

 

The scam internet disconnection calls seem to have tailed off, either due to my reporting them on BT’s website (https://www.bt.com/consumer/edw/scams/) or through TPS kicking in. We’ve gone more than 24 hours without getting a call now (and our internet hasn’t been cut off), so perhaps I can take the phone off silent mode.