TELEPHONE SCAM

Beware of these people phoning you, the UK goverment department TPS is working on it.
They phone you from a cloned number which emulates from the UK typical 01234 which is the dialing code for Bedford.
The telephone number they dial from does not exist, here in the UK dialing 1471 gives you the number of the last call you received, but these scammers beat that system.
They will claim to be a PC help line , one used is PC Wizard and will try to manipulate the vunerable saying a virus is about on your PC.
You can register to stop un wanted calls with, ! but at the moment it wont stop these guys,For more information or to register call TPS
on 0845 070 0707 or go to tpsonline.org.uk.
TPS Advise =Just pick the phone up and leave it there wasting their money.
and another i have had done is replaced caller ID .

[AlanJones]

Hi moggy,

There is a lot of information on these calls on the UK consumer websites such as Consumer Action Group. They tend to originate from India and as you say, they pretend that they are representing Windows or your Internet Service Provider.

As the calls are from India, the TPS are powerless to act on them.

Thanks Alan, maybe they direct you to a site to download a keylogger or what ever , ?

[AlanJones]

As I understand it from reading on other forums, they direct you to a site that allows remote access to the PC, so they could indeed install keyloggers or other such nasties. But they also look to sell an anti-virus solution by making it look like your PC is infected (they direct the victim to system logs and use the entries there (which are all meant to be there) to pretend that your PC is infected)

Thanks for the heads up! I did read something about Caller ID Spoofing... Is that what you mean, Moggy? With this new technology, scammers can now hide their real phone number and what appears on the CID is a fake one. They can easily scam people any way they want, like this Microsoft scam, without exposing who they really are. I'm afraid this can fool a lot of people especially when these scammers use the name of established business or office.

I'm wondering, is there something telephone companies can do about this? Well, aside from scams, this consumer complaint site called Callercenter actually discussed something about this CID Spoofing and I've learned that even if what we see in the CID is fake, telephone companies can see the real phone number and the owner of it. So they're at an advantage. Whether they like it or not, they're being used by scammers and I believe they have an obligation to protect the welfare of their customers.

What do you think?