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So there I was on Saturday night around at my mate's house having a drink and a chat and the phone rings. He talked for a little while than passed it to me, it was my elderly mother. She informed me that she had just had a strange phone call from what she first thought was the British Telecoms operator informing her, "You have a reverse charge call, please press 9 to accept it." As she doesn't usually get reverse charge calls she asked who the caller was and where they were calling from, but, the so called operator wouldn't tell her, she just kept repeating that she would find that out when she accepted the call by pressing 9 then kept on insisting she pressed 9. The sound of a child's voice in the background made her even more suspicious so she hung up and phoned me.
The procedure in the UK and as far as I know the rest of the world is that if you get a reverse charge call the operator tells you at the beginning who the caller is and where they are phoning from. If you wish to accept the call you inform the operator that you will and they connect you. You are not asked to press any buttons to accept it.
This is a telephone fraud. If you were to press 9 to accept it you would then be connected to a premium rate number and be charged at around £20 per minute for a minimum of five minutes even if you hung up immediately. The next day I checked the phone log and found it had recorded the number which was the only one for that night. It was 08456 853000. Whether it is still being used for this fraud I do not know as for some reason I'm rather reluctant to find out.
Being conscientious I thought I would report it to BT. Unfortunately there is no help line or dedicated email address for fraud so I had to do so via their General Feedback form which resulted several days later in a mail from them telling me that they couldn't do anything as my mother's account number and phone number were not filled in the form that incidentally didn't have fields for those or even a request to do so.
Well, it doesn't look as if BT are too interested in telephone fraud, I suppose they get too good a cut from it. So, info about it is posted here instead.
Be careful and keep your finger away from that nine button if someone asks you to press it.
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2 comments:
4 years later..Just had a call today from the exact same number. Strange as mine is a new number and ex-directory. The only people that had it were 'go compare' insurance and it stated they wouldnt give out info. Guess they lied!
Not necessarily Amanda. Firstly being ex-directory just means you are not in those paper telephone books, you are still on disk. However, most of these sort of calls come via telephone number generators that can randomly generate numbers and speed dial them and if they are not answered leave a message. They are also increasingly using VoIP technology making it even more difficult to trace backward.
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