| Warning, Telephone Scam |
| Spitfire | I feel compelled to pass on this message. It would appear to be a potentially very expensive scam indeed.
From: Freeserve
Date: 01 December 2003 11:00:00
To: ADRIAN JONES
Subject: Fw: Scam
> BT confirm that they are aware of this telephone scam and are
investigating.
> Please be aware of the following telephone scam relating to home and/or
work
> phones (including mobiles).
> The scenario is:- Your phone rings and you receive a recorded message;
> "Congratulations. We are calling to advise you that you have won an all
> expenses paid trip to an exotic destination. Please press 9 now to hear
> further details."
> If you press 9, you'll be connected to a premium line that bills in the
> region of £20 per minute.
> If you press 9 and connect, even if you disconnect immediately, the other
> end will stay connected for a minimum of 5 minutes - at a cost to you of
> £100 - the message lasts for 11 minutes.
> The final part of the call asks you to key in your postcode and house
number
> (which has other serious considerations) and then, after a wait of a
further
> two minutes, responds with the message;
> "Sorry, you are not one of the lucky winners." and disconnects, adding a
> further £260 to your bill!
>
> Unfortunately the calls are originating from outside the U.K. and as such
BT
> and other providers are relatively powerless to act.
> The only safe solution is to hang up before the message prompts you to
press
> 9.
>
>
> Details of PARC/PAG services, capabilities and facilities can be accessed
on
> the BAE SYSTEMS intranet at the following address:-
> http://baesystems-web.intranet.baesystems.com/pag/
>
> Roger Hoodless
> BAE SYSTEMS Shared Services-PAG
> West Hanningfield Road
> Great Baddow, Chelmsford
> Essex. CM2 8HN UK
> Voice: +44 (0)1245 242318 Fax: +44 (0)1245 242340
>
>
> ********************************************************************
> This email and any attachments are confidential to the intended
> recipient and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended
> recipient please delete it from your system and notify the sender.
> You should not copy it or use it for any purpose nor disclose or
> distribute its contents to any other person.
> ********************************************************************
>
>
> |
| William R | Spitfire, perhaps not the same one, but I have been getting this type of of call lately on a regular basis. The call opens with a cheerful voice saying "Congratulations! Your telephone number has been selected out of the millions of numbers held on our data base to receive this prize money....etc etc" By that time I have delivered what is known here as "pit language" to the caller and put the receiver down.. A short while later the same thing, a recording, given the same treatment. I never followed it through, so I don`t know the implications. It seems to have stopped in the last few days, as though, with non response, it tries elsewhere. It made a change from Cold-Seal double glazing, who for years pestered me to have some work done. When I really NEEDED them I made contact and got a very good deal from them and am very satisfied. However, since then I have had calls from them (as recent as yesterday) asking if I had considered going ahead with the installation, to which I said look at your records and gave them the job number, I got a "Sorry to have bothered you and away they went. I realise that this is possibly some young lady, doing an evening job for a pittance, given a list of numbers to contact, and paid on her success rate and having to stand the abuse she is bound to get. As I am a Cable Customer and these calls come during the "free call" period, no-one suffers financially if Cold Seal are on Cable - I wonder??? Where will it all end? Keep smiling at Life, Cheerio, William R. |
| anacortesdamp | US phone systems have a very useful feature called "Caller i/d". With the proper display (often built into the phone handset) it shows the caller's name and number. As a caller, you can choose to have your i/d blocked as a default but can unblock it on a call-by-call basis.
Telephone sales companies always have blocked i/d, so, if we get "Caller Unknown", we don't answer. If it shows "Blocked call", we figure someone forgot to unblock before calling.
We also have the three tone playback on our answering machine that is the one you get when you call a number that has been disconnected. That causes the telemarketers' computers to remove your number from the database.
After about a year with these systems, the number of sales calls per day has dropped from 25 to about 3. Of course, a lot of these bozos have switched over to spam e-mail, but I've got spam blockers too.
Frank Damp |
| noel | Can you recommend a Spam blocker Frank? I receive maybe 40 spam messages a day. I'm sick of them. I've also had the holiday phone call 3 times the last being about a month ago. I slammed the phone down within seconds of hearing the message. Picked it up again about 20 seconds later and the message was still playing. I don't understand how or why a call should be able to cost £20 a minute. Surely BT, the government or Trading Standards could do something to block these calls. |
| anacortesdamp | Noel:
My ISP log-in software includes a spam blocker, but it's not spectacular. I also use a free program called "Mailwasher", which I got from PCWorld magazine's website. With Mailwasher, you can set filters to keep specific senders or title content away. You still have to scan the message titles, but if you choose to delete a message, it is deleted at the network server and never downloads to your computer. Its only drawback is that it isn't in the line when your mail program is active.
I'll look for the magazine article, but can't guarantee I still have it. There are some very smart spam blockers available that use Baynesian logic to learn what you think should be blocked and tney get better with experience. I haven't tried one.
Frank |
| William R | Hi, I`m using a pop-up stopper, which to date has blocked 54 since I switched it on. I can`t remember where I got it from, maybe from the free discs which come with P.C.Advisor. I had an interesting talk today with a telesales person today from PowerGen, offering me incentives to change power and gas suppliers. It turned out that all the unanswered calls I have been receiving, had been generated by their dial out computer, which had developed a fault, and was dialling my number. Found it by dialling 1471. All is well now, or so I hope, no more calls. My phone number is one digit from the local dial-up server, sometimes I get a call every time someone logs on. That seems to be resting at the moment Never a dull moment. Cheerio for now, William R. |
| noel | I've managed to download the file Frank, it's http://www.mailwasher.net/ for anyone who'se interested. I particularly like the way you can delete spam before it's downloaded, thus saving time where large attachments would be downloaded.
Thanks for that. William I also have a popup stopper. Who ever thought we'd be using terms like this 10 years ago. |
| Martin | if you use outlook or another mail client, you can use the settings to stop large downloads in your emails. |
| William R | Noel, Way back in the early 1950`s I went with Leyland Motors Engineering Society to Manchester University to be shown their new "Electronic Brain" which occupied a full floor, with all its cabinets, with an annexe in which was a power supply and smoothing gear for running the "brain". We were very impressed to see the unit doing simple calculations, little did we realise what we were seeing the beginning of. Mind bending!! Then back to the 20" slide rules for true accuracy at work, or six figure log tables. We saw history in the making that day. William R. |
| Spitfire | For anyone who is looking for a pop-up stopper (a free one at that), you may like to try :-
www.panicware.com I have used it for quite a while now and have been very impressed. |
| LDunlop76 | Re Frank's comment - caller ID phones are available over here. Also BT offers a service for a small quarterly charge by which they block all calls from unidentified numbers. We used it for a while when we were getting prank calls. The only drawback is it fails to recognise the number of anyone calling from an extension, so my Dad couldn't ring from work and one of the children's schools had trouble getting through, so we only kept in on for 6 months to deter the prankster.
Bill, hubby and I went to Liverpool university in the 70's when the monster computer at Manchester was still in use and being shared between Liverpool and Manchester universities! How incredible that seems today! As hubby was doing electrical engineering, he had to use the computer as part of his coursework, but Liverpool students had to wait for their alloted time slot to feed their computer cards (binary system, hole-punched cards) into a machine and transmit it to Manchester. Seems daft to think we've got more powerful machines sitting in our front rooms nowadays than entire universities had 25 years ago! |
| anacortesdamp | Linda:
The calculator you can buy at Curry's for 2 quid has more capability than British Aerospace had in its computers when I left in 1966! They took up a room about 20 x 100 ft and needed incredible amounts of air conditioning.
I remember working with a system at Warton called DEUCE, which had a capability roughly equivalent to a 5 quid scientific calculator. It was programmed in binary code and it was a real hernia to get data out in a format you could understand. I was a student apprentice in Flight Test at the time and computers were the latest "magic".
Little did we know then how much they would take over our lives! Even though I worked in Flight Simulation for 12 years, the potential didn't register.
Frank
Frank |
| William R | Spitfire, Thanks for info. Mine was from "panicware" now you have reminded me. For me it does all they claim it will. William R. |