Scammers fleece Australians out of $800,000 in one month as fake calls surge

Australian Broadcasting Corporation ^ | 5 Dec 2018 | Editor

[BlackVeil]

Australians were conned out of more than $800,000 in November alone as a "tsunami" of scam phone calls threatened people with arrest if they did not hand over their personal details. ...

[luvbach1]

I got a call recently. Ignored it. Got another months ago, ditto.

[Big Red Badger]

My call was an electronic voice
from a New York area code stateing
that I would be contacted by
local Law enforcement concerning
Serious Charges if I didn’t call
them back to Settle the issues.
It really Spooked me.
I didn’t respond and
No 3am knocks on the door.
Happened about 3 months ago.

[Hot Tabasco]

I’ve been getting those calls for months now on my cell phone.

Me too....a couple a day. The calls are from area codes all across the country and they're trying to push some health insurance.

I finally figured out h0w to not be bothered by them. I went into "settings" and put my phone on "do not disturb". The only calls that ring on my phone are from people in my address book. Any one not in my book that really wants me can leave me a voice mail message......The robocallers don't bother to leave a message.

[Bonemaker]

We are deluged with these calls daily. The phone numbers showing in caller ID are from a variety of area codes and a bunch are from ours. Unless it’s someone I can identify I don’t answer. Several times they have left the threatening message on voicemail. Laughable.

[Bonemaker]

We are deluged with these calls daily. The phone numbers showing in caller ID are from a variety of area codes and a bunch are from ours. Unless it’s someone I can identify I don’t answer. Several times they have left the threatening message on voicemail. Laughable.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

We’re considering the same...

[jmacusa]

I can understand your fear, it is an invasion of sorts by foreign thieves using technology to commit crime. But police departments, the IRS don't make phones calls. For any IRS issue you get a registered letter explaining why and what for you're being audited for or whatever. And the address is always from Holtsville, New York. As to the police if there's a complaint or an outstanding warrant or possible knowledge of witness to or participation in a crime they come to your house. And it's more often a detective. If they need to arrest you then the uniform cops are called or if it's really serious they both go. The calls are a total scam. No need to be afraid. I lived in North Jersey and worked in NYC in the union construction industry. Learned so much about human greed and a good line of bs and how to spot it. If ever you have this happen again you can being verbal threatening as I was and I meant. Never forget these aren't hard working Indian people with good intentions. They're thieves looking to rob you blind. Or play mind games with them, ask all kinds of dumb questions like "What, you owe me a refund? Great! How much is it?

[King Moonracer]

I don’t know why our beloved telecomm providers can’t stop this. The scum can spoof local phone numbers when calling, why is that not trapped? Can they not tell that when caller ID does not match the calls country of origin that there is an issue? Surely the NSA could hunt these people down for training, sport, and practice. Everytime a call center is found, they should kill the local switch. Maybe these foreign countries that allow the scammers to operate will police themselves if they continuously have to repair computer hardware for their infrastructure.

As for local scammers, they should be able to tell that a residence is making 200+ calls an hour. I’m sure the NSA data center filters out robocalls. 20 years ago, cell providers could figure out if a caller moved too quickly between towers, that they were probably cloned, so they wouldn’t connect the call. Technology should give us tools to throttle the scammers.

Rachel from cardholder services is a dead woman!

[bert]

—— (from India)——

After cussing one of the callers out for a prolonged interval and using the words Indian scum, the caller meekly informed me that he was “from LA”

I laughed out loud

[shotgun]

It won’t be any better with the cell phones. Now their calling with local 0refixes to trick you. If you don’t answer then they call in 2’s and 3’s back to back with similar local numbers

[Clay Moore]

Just make sure you don’t mistake an Indian accent for a Pakistani accent. I keep making that mistake and they get really upset.

[bert]

Good point.....

I think these perps are from India though.

I had a dell concierge account and the “helpers” were all in India. I discovered to my chagrin that the assistance was basically worthless. I think Dell dropped the service because it was just bad.

However, the helpers still had all the old client info and phone numbers and it was them making the calls claiming to be Microsoft.

[N. Theknow]

About ready to drop our land line phone forever. About all we get are scam callers.

Between the scam calls, election/political calls and reaching 65 and eligible for Medicare calls, we pulled the plug on the landline in early October.

[super7man]

I have received several robo calls regarding delinquent taxes and the kicker is when they say, "We will send the cops to your house to arrest you." Nobody says "cops". LOL.

[max americana]

he could be my neighbor LOL

[Armscor38]

No, My landline is provided by a local telephone company and not a cable service. The last time the power went out for an extended time, the younger folks who just had cell phones couldn’t send or receive call when their phones died while us old timers who had corded phones could still make and receive calls.

[Bonemaker]

Post script: I even got a call from myself today! Hilarious.

[ssaftler]

About ready to drop our land line phone forever. About all we get are scam callers.

Not sure that will help anymore. I was clearing out the call log on my cell phone last week and counted 15 scammers calling me during that time. IIRC, there were two different scams. One group offering to sell me Medicare supplemental insurance (I'm not old enough for Medicare yet) and the other group was telling me that "your phone has been selected for a free trip" to some hotel in East Overshoe.

At least the robo-calls for air duct cleaning that show up on my VOIP "landline" with some regularity haven't migrated to my cell phone. Well, not yet anyway.

[ssaftler]

I don’t know why our beloved telecomm providers can’t stop this. The scum can spoof local phone numbers when calling, why is that not trapped? Can they not tell that when caller ID does not match the calls country of origin that there is an issue?

With VOIP (Voice over Internet), it's almost impossible to detect the origin of calls. A number of our friends with family in Europe have bought VOIP phones locally, with local phone numbers, then brought them as gifts to overseas family. Plug the VOIP line into your Internet modem, and the phone works just fine. Dial a local number in Florida, and the phone at your cousin's house in France rings.

Even knowing the IP address of the calling VOIP phone doesn't help, thanks to Virtual Private Networks (VPN). If you were to trace the IP address on this message, you would see that I am somewhere in Oregon (I think that's where my VPN software logged me in today). In fact, I'm in another state at least 700 miles away from there. And tomorrow, I may get logged in to a VPN server in Nevada or Arizona, or even British Columbia.

[Repeal The 17th]

re: catching the robocall phone scammers...
-
It is just a matter of wanting to do it badly enough.

If someone was using voip and vpn or whatever
to call Nancy Pelosi and making death threats,
do you think they would get away with it?