Gas board.

[Geordie McBoyne]

Received a phone call from a guy claiming he represented the Gas Board. The Gas board! I said, that ceased to exist years ago. Immediately, the phone went dead. Another scammer?
Dialed 1471, number withheld.

Geordie McBoyne.

[Refugee]

My other half answered a call from a bloke that was obviously from a hot country whom was trying to tell us something was wrong with windows on our computer.
We have two computers with Linux on them.
I was duly called over as the expert. I pulled the voice line and left it for a few minutes for him to give up.
Job done.

[Murphyv310]

The amount of scammers is terrible.
If I get any I immediately dial 14258 then once the number is confirmed dial # twice then the number is blocked, obviously won't work with withheld numbers.

[pwdrive]

A withheld number is invisible to the subscriber but not the 'phone company, normally you can blacklist it via the 'phone companies website if you have an online account.

Lawrence.

[peter scott]

In the past I have pretended to be an even more stupid old codger than I really am and string them along while I have difficulty in doing what they want me to do. After about 20 minutes I tell them I can happily waste more of their time if they want but suggest that they hang-up and don't call again.

That said I'm inclined now just not to answer any number that I don't recognise.

Peter

[Old Sparky]

Perhaps I'm lucky in that way, but I don't get many scam phone calls. However, the next time I do, I'll dial 14258 as you suggest, Trevor. Thanks for drawing my/our attention to that. Can't speak for anyone else, but I hadn't heard of that way of blocking them. Likewise, Lawrence, I'll bear the ability to Blacklist these numbers via the phone company website in mind.

[ppppenguin]

Caller display is now included in all line rental, no longer a chargeable extra.

But the number you see is readily falsified, so what you see may not be what you get. Like Peter, I sometimes play the fool, depending on whether I'm in the mood to waste my own time too. I don't get legitimate calls from overseas so anything that's "international" or has a malformed number gets ignored. "Witheld" might be legitimately coming from my doctor or hospital so I tend to answer these if I'm expecting anything. Again like Peter I answer numbers I know about, though sometimes I end up answering a properly formed UK number that turns out to be rubbish.

The golden rule is: Never give away anything about yourself. Never , ever attempt to call any of these numbers back. Most are harmless in that they don't really exist but in a few cases it gives the scammer useful info. Not forgetting the 070 number scam, where calling it back costs you a fair bit of money, some of which goes to the scammer you're calling. That specific problem is almost fixed now that Ofcom have changed the rules for 070 numbers.

I beleive that BT and other phone providers actually screen out the bulk of the rubbish automatically. What reaches us is a tiny fraction.

[Murphyv310]

I actually have never seen any withheld numbers show on my account, so how can you blacklist a number that you can't see? There were two last week and I have the date and time as per the handset, nothing for either of them on my online list.

[pwdrive]

I actually have never seen any withheld numbers show on my account,  so how can you blacklist a number that you can't see? There were two last week and I have the date and time as per the handset,  nothing for either of them on my online list.

Usually you can check recent callers online, the number and time called is given, withheld number just gives the time called, with mine I can blacklist the number whether withheld or not.


The more often you talk to these scammers (even to wind them up) the longer you'll be on the world wide suckers list for repeat and repeat calling.

Lawrence.

[ppppenguin]

Not sure I'm entirely proud of what I did to one lot of scammers. They were ostensibly some kind of market research, the caller was a well spoken woman. I asked her for certain services, indicating that I was willing to pay. She hung up in tears. So far so bad but the surprise was her supervisor phoning me back to complain about my treatment of her. I just laughed at him and suggested that he was running a rather different sort of business.

I googled the number afterwards and it came up in several sites as a source of scam calls.

New legislation should make TPS redundant: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2...nce-calls/
Of course it won't affect overseas scammers (probably most of them now) but it makes the situation clear enough that only the worst UK based scammers will continue to ply their trade.

I'm still getting 2 or 3 per week on my landline. None recently on my mobile but I do use the Truecaller app which silently deals with most rubbish. For that matter not much spam email making it through to my inbox these days. My email hosting (1&1) are presumably doing some bulk filtering. Followed by local filtering by my Thunderbird email client.