The phone rang. An automated voice told me that this was the serious crime agency and some illegal activity had taken place using my national insurance number. Consequently, this has been frozen along with all my assets. Press 1 to speak to the case officer.
Yeah, right, of of course I did…
We got one claiming that we needed to renew our Amazon Prime account. We buy tons of stuff from Amazon and of course anything connected with the account is taken care of automatically. This one also had a press one instruction which presumably leads you to being on hold on a premium rate phone line.
We have recently been getting cold calls from people with an Indian accent. I used to at least listen to what they had to say before politely saying that I wasn’t interested, now I just hang up straight away.
I had the old ‘You’ve been in a car accident that wasn’t your fault’ call. It was a realistic female voice ( and had a name) but it was a computer that cleverly responded to my answers. I asked if it was human and after a delay said yes, I then asked what it’s birthday was (best I could think of at the time) it got confused and after a short delay hung up. I’m going to have some fun with these new scams.
I suppose I could have pressed 1 and asked them when the serious crime agency moved to Jaipur…
I used to get all of this garbage on the landline, so I removed the landline, since who needs that in the 21st Century (this was a few years back). Net result? No more bullshit calls from “pauper councils, Lombardy pirate banking houses and pissant gas-mongerers”
A few years back these bastards started playing the same tricks on mobile, which is fortunately a bit more intelligent than the old house telephone. I tracked down an app called “Mr. Number” which allows you to automatically discard things like scam numbers, foreign numbers (other than those in my contacts) and other forms of pest and the number of nuisance calls dropped off dramatically.
The biggest drop off was by blocking “unidentified numbers”, because if you’re blocking Caller ID then I assume you’re up to no good. Not been proven wrong yet…
I still have a landline but only use it for the Interwebs these days. I have Truecall installed that aggressively blocks unwanted calls.
This one came through on the mobile. To be fair, the call was flagged as possible fraud. I answered it out of curiosity to find out what their pitch was. As for blocking unidentified or private numbers, the problem is that there are people like the GP who shield their number.
That will also shield you from Track’n’Trace not to mention the Police.