Gas board.

[Murphyv310]

I don't have or entertain a credit card, call me old fashioned by all means.
If I don't have the funds then I save up.
I did subscribe to one charity but when I found out about their sexual abuse I stopped the DD. I was a member of this charity for some years and was shocked when I found out. All I'll say it isn't the one started in Oxford.

[Refugee]

The payment I had to stop appeared without me giving any instruction what so ever. I called our phone banking service and explained and they refunded me and changed the card number for me.
This failed and on round 2 they investigated further. I got my money back again.
A few weeks after getting it sorted with round 2 I found out what had really gone wrong from the news.
It was Equifax.
They had been hacked by a fake company that had set up some kind of commission account to sell there services.
So now you know what happens if the hackers get your data from a big company.

[Crackle]

The most common scammers we get on the telephone claim they are from Blueyonder. (now called Virgin Media) They know my email address, first and last names, and IP address. All these are probably easy to get from the various internet accounts and even from an email I have sent somewhere. The last one was very persistent, even when I called him a scammer, he was still insisting that I check some settings on my router. I actually had to hang up on him which is unusual when you accuse them of being a scammer. He even knew I had previously had a fault with the router.
I have actually wondered if there is a leak in the security in Virgin Media's Indian call centres.

Mike

[peter scott]

I have actually wondered if there is a leak in the security in Virgin Media's Indian call centres.

Mike

Yesterday I wondered the same thing. (I am also with Virgin.) I received a phone call from "Microsoft" giving me the usual guff about terminating my service. I just asked him lots of questions:
Where are you located?
Do you enjoy your job?
Do they pay you well?
Do you get good holidays?
etc, etc
He got slightly irritated by this and asked if I was Mr Peter Scott to which I said my name is Black.
He then told me that I was with Virgin and correctly gave me my home address.
I insisted that I don't have a computer and then he told me I would be cut off and hung up.

Peter

[ppppenguin]

Scammers come in all grades from utterly incompetent to highly effective. It's an ecosystem with pressures of selection, just like any other business.

Mike's problem with the ones who refuse to hang up is an interesting one. I've had variants on this. Even the most basic training for the drones on the phones should include the instruction: "Hang up at the first sign of trouble". Anything else is a complete waste of time, except perhaps for the most high value, highly targeted scams. By keeping somebody busy on the phone we are doing 2 things: Wasting our own time (though it may be amusing us if we're in the mood) and performing a public service by keeping them off somebody else's back for a while.

If you're trying to dupe somebody, it's often effective to appear like one of their peer group. So on the phone I'm most likely to be fooled by somebody who speaks excellent English with an RP accent. Such scammers are very rare indeed. I think I've only ever had one call in that category. I still wasn't fooled. A famous example of a peer group scam was Bernie Madoff. He preyed on his own upper middle class Jewish community with his ponzi scheme. They thought they knew and trusted him. They were wrong.