Every day at 08.30 we get a call on the landline. The voice on the call has been run through a speech generator, so it sounds mid-Atlantic, but the punctuation isn’t good, so the voice sounds even more peculiar than it would normally.
The machine voice says words to the effect of:
Thank you for purchasing the hideously expensive iPhone for £896 from Amazon. This will be delivered to you shortly. If you haven’t made this purchase please speak to Amazon customer service by pressing 1
Well obviously nobody here has bought an iPhone for any price, let alone bought anything else for £896, but I’ll be blowed if I’m going to press 1 to be connected to a premium rate fake call centre which is going to cost me an arm and three legs per minute to sort out a fictitious order.
1471 tells me that the incoming call originated from 07820 169 412.
So I had a word with our telco for landline/broadband services: Vodafone UK. The conversation breaks down like this:
Me: There’s a problem and this is the description of the problem. What I want you to do is to block the number please
Vodafone UK: You can automatically stop people who withhold their number from calling you. Just call us on 08080 034 515 (free from landlines and mobiles) and we’ll have our Anonymous caller rejection service ready for you within 24 hours
Me: It’s not an anonymous caller
Vodafone UK: OK, please head on over to (url) to find more information on what to do next (the url points to ‘How to identify and report Wangiri fraud).
Me: The incoming call presents as a UK mobile number, so Wangiri fraud doesn’t apply. You seem not have a simple solution to a simple problem. Why don’t you just give customers a ‘block this number’ facility?
Vodafone UK: We would only be able to block either all incoming our outgoing calls, we are not able to block certain or specific numbers.
Me: And that’s how you lose a customer
It’s mad that someone is attempting to perpetrate a daily fraud on us, via the telephone service that our telco provides, and our telco’s response is, basically, ‘That’s not our problem’.
I’ve reported the attempt to the National Fraud and Cyber Crime Reporting Centre, perhaps I’ll start doing this each day, when the call comes in.
Anyway, it later came to me (from Vodafone UK) that no UK landline provider are able to block individual numbers in this way. Some handsets have the capability, but landline providers don’t, even when people/organisations are trying to fraudulently obtain money.
You can draw your own conclusions.
Telephone fraud: the other pandemic.
Yes, I think the cleverness for call blocking is in the handsets (I think that applies to mobiles too, but I could be wrong), but in this day and age, I agree with you that it should be possible to block numbers at the exchange before they even get to you. With all this on the increase, it needs the government to step in and push the telcos to get their act together. I might write to my MP… I’m quite good at that now. 🙂