New scam, please read this!

[knip]

I had to post due to the seriousness of this, and the fact its happened to a friend of mine.

They rang him last night and said "We're from BT you havent paid your bill for three months and unless you pay us now we are going to disconnect you"
He said that he had paid his bill so they must be mistaken, and that it had to be a scam.

They said, we get lots of people saying this, so in five minutes we will disconnect your line, and then five minutes after that we will reconnect you and then you will know we are genuine.

They did this, and he was unable to use his phone, nor could he ring the phone from his mobile, the line was dead. So when they rang back, he assumed it had to be real and gave them his bank details to pay the bill.

Theyve taken all his money.

I appreciate some will see through this straight away (im not with BT so would know it was fake, but apparently when he spoke to the bank they have mentioned other providers as well) but I just wanted to make people aware of it, so they can spread the word.

 

[knip]

Thanks for the heads up but real companies write letters.

That's what i always tell them if they ring, put it in writing.

Response in this situation:

Tell the caller to put the details in writing to the address they should already have. Hang up. Call BT customer services and ask to be put through to the billing department.

Gawd knows how they did it, but they did, and he does know the difference between a line being busy and being dead, as I said he rang his phone from his mobile, and it just did the long continuous noise you get when a numbers been disconnected.

Im sure that a lot of people would see this as a scam, im just posting it for those who might not because of them actually disconnecting his phone somehow.

 

[knip]

how did they empty his account?

Because he gave them his switch card number to make the payment with the card details and security code etc. Thats all they need I guess.

 

[knip]

What he said.

It made the long continous sound a phone number makes if you ring it and its been disconnected.

 

[knip]

Sorry, but your friend has to be somehow mentally impaired to think that a huge company such as BT would phone up, ask for bill payment and then turn his line off for 5 mins to prove they're for real.
.

But the line WAS turned off. So there might be a little bit of you that thinks a huge company such as BT might have the power to do that, so you might believe them when it then happened.