Article relating to the Landline scam!

Dear Residents of UK

Please read this article carefully, it could save you, your money and stop you getting scammed!

Hello everyone, the scammers have finally found a way to annoy us further. Their latest is a scam is where they call your landline and claim to be from your ISP (internet service provider) or your bank, threatening to close the accounts down due to illegal activity or a slightly different excuse, but they have done something even worse now.

If you do not answer the call before your voicemail activates a program will run that will redial your landline number several times on a time interval between 20-60 mins randomly. The only method I have found to break this programs loop (repeating) is to answer the call before the voicemail picks it up and when the recorded voice starts talking, just hang up.

So far this has worked for me and I hope it will for you. Let us hope they do not figure out how to get around this method.

So how do you know if it is a scam, first thing I noticed immediately, is the recorded voice, this not a normal voice it is computer generated. The second thing is that our banks will sometimes txt message us (on mobile) if there is some fraud, overdraft or bad payment were happening, they would normally txt from either full name as shown “Nationwide” or a short txt number like “60255”, never from a random mobile number. So look for txt messages coming from strange mobile numbers (which are not from them), please note this works for the EE and mobile scams as well.

As for the landline calls, the banks will never contact you through your landline! Unless you asked them to do a call back! But even if you are still not sure you should always contact the bank yourself, to verify.

Now about the ISP scam, your internet service provider will also never call you through your landline! This was stated by ISPs many years ago when these computer security and ISP scams first came around. So if you are receiving these calls and you did not ask them to call you by raising a ticket or asking the company to give you a call back, then DO NOT give these people access to your devices or bank details!
These latest calls have come from such numbers as follows, but there are many variations:

Scammers Numbers:
0016474175226, 01495046202, 0016476008925, 07589438589, 07589671936, 07828621123, 09132316459, 01120412316 etc

Now looking at the numbers at first you may see a pattern, such as 00164... or 078... but I came to the conclusion, that some of these calls were coming from different scammers and that tracing them is a waste of time, because the number changes each time.

The scammers are using a program or some kind of hardware/software that is randomly generating the number they are calling from making it almost impossible to trace, also answering or hanging up will generate a new number.

So I hope this article has been useful to some or most, please share it with those who are not on social media or writing.com and any authorities you feel may need to know about this, let’s stay safe everyone.

Please feel free to reply to this post if you have any statements or questions.