First telephone scam of the year!

[Jimmy Stewart]

watch out they may fight back by calling you "Chebs"....tee hee

[Jimmy Stewart]

bet you do though ...

[Jimmy Stewart]

Jdi o pr

[Jimmy Stewart]

Jdi o pr

[Tim Lamb]

Could they possibly be concerned about losing revenue?

They called my landline.

[Fred]

I got that when I specified Hindi as the language. Now when I tell it to detect the language is says Mother plants and claims the language is Gujarati.

[Fred]

That wont work, too easy to cripple a competitor that way.

[Adrian]

In message <ru1n1s$e8f$ [e-mail], NY [e-mail] writes

I had a spam call (*) a year or more back, and when I looked up the number, it existed, and belonged to a business, which I'd not heard of, and certainly hadn't had any dealings with. A short time researching it suggested that the number had been used when calling several other people.

(*) I'm assuming that it was a spam call, when I picked up, I heard nothing, and a moment later the call was terminated by the caller. If I do answer to an unknown number (one not in my book), then I always pause before saying anything. This is on the theory that any legitimate caller will say something when they hear the phone being picked up, even if they don't get a "hello" from my end.

Adrian

[mm0fmf]

Well you must be doing something wrong then.

[Fred]

Not possible when you select detect language and paste the phrase.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

mm0fmf explained :

I perfectly understood all of it, which bit of my reply did you not understand?

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

NY brought next idea :

I understand that there is the genuine originating number included in all calls.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

NY laid this down on his screen :

All such calls are blocked here by my phone, but none-the-less it logs each of them and if I can be bothered - I call them back. Almost everyone is a 'no such number', but occasionally I get it to ring and sometimes it will be answered by an innocent party who has had their number spoofed. Often they will be aware, because they have been flooded with callers asking them why they had rung.

[NY]

When I mentioned "landline" and "real phone numbers" I was talking about the connection and caller's spoofed number, not the line/number on which they called you.

I've heard of very rare occasions when the spoofed number is your own: a call *to* you (apparently) from *you* is one of those "it can't happen" situations, so it's a dead giveaway that it's spam/scam. I make no real distinction between spam and scam: they are both nuisance calls which make you drop everything to answer your phone, even if one goes further and tries to con you out of money. It's the same as religious people who knock at the door and try to "convert" you to their religion: they are almost certainly not trying to con you out of money but they have still disturbed you without

*what I would regard as* good cause.

[Chris J Dixon]

In my experience, they are certainly familiar enough with UK terms of abuse, sufficient to indicate that I have annoyed them, and thus achieved my target, whilst frustrating them reaching theirs.

Chris

[Davidm]

I use a TrueCall device, very pleased with it, few junk calls get through. If a call is not from someone on the friends list, it asks for their name, which it then rings my phone and states the name. I can choose to accept it, send it to voicemail, of mark it as spam. If I do nothing it just goes to voicemail. Most spammers hand up on hearing a voicemail welcome message. On the TrueCall logs you can see all received calls and any of these spam hangups nearly always happen after 36 seconds, so every so often I go through the log and any 36 second calls get added to my zap list - these just get an instant hangup. Works well, I've had less than 5 get through in the last 2 years.

[Dave Plowman (News]

The only way I can see that is going to work is for you to say what calls are to be let through, by their number. Ie, those on your contact list. All others have to jump through hoops to contact you. Which scam callers simply won't bother with.

I suppose you might loose the odd call you wanted. But unlikely.

[alan_m]

Slightly on topic... I watched around 10 minutes of kids TV the other day. A fictional program where someone was being given work experience in a call centre pretending to be doing customer research but by the sound of it up-selling broadband or 5G.

It appears that the hundreds of customers being cold called by the 'actor' were all willing to participate in the survey and were all polite!

Back in the real world doesn't this kids a false impression of getting a job in a scam centre?

[Dave Plowman (News]

I've got a principle. If a stranger wants help from me that they are going to make money from, they can pay for that help too.

[Bob Eager]

My phone gives callers without caller ID a menu. If they select the survey option, they are informed of my charges. They never stay on the line.