scam calls - an update...

David Moore
Jun 9, 2021
2 min read

...they keep calling back and pretending to be someone else.

Recently a customer of mine was taken in by a scam caller.

The scammers called them on the phone with the original premise that there was a problem with an Amazon order.

Seeing as my customer had no Amazon account, and didn't buy things online, they quickly put the erroneous call to bed and hung up on them.

However, half an hour later the same customer received a call from the NBN company.

Spoiler alert, it wasn't (and never is).

This time, because they did have NBN, they were taken in and remote access to their computer and phone was achieved.

My customer told me that she was pretty sure it was the same people.

It was her that told me "they called back" pretending to be the NBN.

While I can't verify this claim, it makes sense that scammers would try this technique i.e. they just keep calling back people they know will answer pretending to be various "entities" until one of those rings true to the "customer".

Claiming to be "the NBN company" is a pretty fair bet for fooling people because most Australians are now on the NBN in one form or another.

However, it is also a poor choice by the scammers because the NBN Co. is very clear about not wanting to deal with end users. They only talk to their resellers i.e your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

This persistence from scammers is not new but it is something you need to be aware of and very strong about about handling.

I had one customer who knew she was being called by a scammer pretending to be Telstra.

So she hung up on them.

However, they called back several times. In the end she let them access her computer. She decided that they must be the real Telstra simply because they persisted.

Now, when has the real Telstra EVER persisted :-) Never. That's when.

The lesson here is the same as always,