OT: Cunning new scam.

[Rick Hughes]

It's like when I get a call form a bank or similar (so far always genuine) they introduce themselves then ask me to answers security questions to confirm who I am ... not a chance in hell.

I would never give my security information to someone who called me .... I ask for their name and then phone official customer service number and advise of call, and they put me though (or deal themselves)

If people give out security details to someone they don't know, who cold-called them .... I'm sorry but you deserve to be scammed.

[F]

And some of the smarter scammers play you a recording of a dial tone.

[Andy Burns]

The point is, how do you know it's *real *dial tone, not a recording of dial tone being played by the scammers?

[Java Jive]

[tim.....]

Not sure which end of the call is the mobile in your question

But calls to mobiles clear down if either end terminates because the wireless connection is a shared resource that the network might need for someone else.

A landline is a fixed piece of wire that is specific to your line and keeping it busy harms no-one (the victims of this scam excepted)

tim

[tim.....]

but this is not helped because banks:

a) do call you up insisting that you answer their security questions

b) staff often become quite impatient if you refuse to do so

Frankly the banks should behave better, but they don't

[The Natural Philosopher]

it's easy enough to generate a false dial tone at their end.

[The Natural Philosopher]

easy to fake dial tone.

[John Rumm]

...and with your own PABX even respond to dial attempts in an appropriate way.

[Bob Eager]

The scammers play dial tone down the phone...

[Mike Clarke]

Mine (HSBC) did it a bit better when they phoned me recently - they gave me partial details of some of the security info and asked me to complete the rest. I don't remember the exact details now but is was something like telling me the day of the month of my DOB and asking me to complete the rest, part of my post code and asking for the rest plus a few other details dealt with in the same way. The combination of these questions and referring to some recent communication I'd had with them left neither party in any doubt of the other's identity.

[Dave Liquorice]

Will that go away if you flash the switch hook a few times, aka pulse dial a one or two?

[SteveW]

It's a very useful feature. Presumably the person making the call is prepared, but the person receiving it is not - they may want to put the phone down and move to another room where they can sit comfortably, access documents or simply it is quieter. Yes you can leave the first phone off the hook and move to the second, but then anyone in the first room can hear the conversation and the phone is also picking up noise there too.

SteveW

[Davey]

This leads me to another question: I have a DECT two-handset system. If one handset is online, the other one displays "Line in Use". If this scam is played, and the line is not cleared but a recording of a dial-tone is played instead, will it also fool the DECT 'phones? What do they actually look for in a dial tone?

[dennis]

In general they don't look for anything.

The base station is telling the phone that the other one is online because it decides which one to connect.

[Dave Liquorice]

questions

When I've got into that catch 22 with a bank I've told them to write to me if it's that important. I have never hada letter in response, I get the feeling that these sort of calls are thinly diguised sales calls.

I've had a couple of calls from Barclaycard fraud prevention. They have a good system which involves non personal data from you but requires questions from them that it would be very difficult for a scammer to know. Like which stores do you frequently use or from a list of three recent, plauseable, transactions that they read out which one is valid.

The sort of information that they can't release to the sales team...

[John Rumm]

With most exchanges, flashing the hook (or hitting the break/recall button) will hold the current call[1] and return you to the exchange dial tone. If you were to then hang up, it would immediately ring back and connect you back to the parked call.

The feature can be used for things like 3 way calling so you can initiate another call while holding one.

[1] the person on the other end gets a recorded message telling them that you are on another call etc.

[John Rumm]

Some of them do stuff like give you five multiple choice possibilities for your birth date, and you dial 1 to 5 etc, and then repeat for another question or two.

[Tim Watts]

On Saturday 17 August 2013 21:28 Mike Clarke wrote in uk.d-i-y:

My bank/CC dept rang me and asked to verify me. I told them that was illogical and *I required them to verify themselves*.

Strangely they had a script option for that and said "ring the number on your card and there'll be a note on your file saying how to direct your call" (or something very similar - cannot remember his exact words).

So I rang back and lo behold, after the short formalities and me saying I was calling back, they put me through to the right dept and the (different) person there knew exactly what they needed to talk to me about.

Another option would have been for him to have given me a codeword or even just a dept name to ask for.

[Davey]

But how does the base station know that, or if, the dial tone it hears is real or fake? Or does it not know?