Possible fraudulent call from o2

Sparkle80

Hi there, I hope I’m on the correct board.

This evening (8.50pm) I received a call from someone saying he was from o2 regarding my contact. (it did come up with the genuine o2 number of 03448090202). He said they’d had a request for an upgrade & just needed to confirm it was made by myself.

I haven’t requested an upgrade & told him this. He said that he was going to text me a 6 digit number & could I confirm this back to me. I said I wasn’t happy to do this as I didn’t know for sure he was from O2. He said that if I didn’t confirm the number my phone would be locked as of tomorrow. I said I’d phone o2 myself.

I tried to contact them but they close at 9 and was unable to get through.

Now I’m worried that this upgrade has been sent out to someone pretending to be me & theres nothing I can do about it until the morning. Has anyone experienced anything similar & is this normal for them to send a code to you to confirm who you are? (I still haven’t received any text from them)

mobilejunkie

Why would he send a "code" to the number he is calling and ask you to confirm it back to him? I'd run a mile and call O2 tomorrow. Don't lose sleep over it.

Sparkle80

mobilejunkie wrote: »

Why would he send a "code" to the number he is calling and ask you to confirm it back to him? I'd run a mile and call O2 tomorrow. Don't lose sleep over it.

That’s what I was thinking too? Thanks for your reply, it’s made me feel better about it!

McKneff

Ignore it all. And forget it all...

Sleep well lol

Sparkle80

Called o2 this morning & they had no record of the call. He said it could have been someone from their sales team as they don!!!8217;t record on the notes any calls they make (?). Very strange way of trying to get more sales if it was them!

Anyway, main thing is my account hasn!!!8217;t been compromised. Thanks guys for your replies.

Ian011

One very important point to note about CLI. The number shown on your screen is NOT the number that the call came from, it is merely a "presentation number". There are many circumstances where this has been programmed by the caller to show a different phone number other than the one they are actually calling from.

Phone calls can only ever genuinely "come from" a landline, mobile or VoIP connection. Where a non-geographic number is shown on caller display, this is usually the central "inbound" number of a callcentre. This masks the individual landline phone number that called.

In genuine circumstances, the displayed phone number acts as an invitation as to the number to call back on should the call be dropped or it be a missed call. Scammers also change the displayed number, such as in the "wangiri" (one ring and cut) scam designed to trick people into ringing expensive premium rate numbers that generate revenue for the scammers.

As the number shown on screen can be changed by the caller, it proves absolutely nothing about whether the call is genuine. Scammers regularly spoof the numbers used by banks and card companies in an attempt to appear genuine. The number shown on screen cannot alone ever give any indication as to whether a call is genuine.

brewerdave

Asking for a six digit code to be read back off an incoming text,smells like a fraud - its happened with fraudsters trying to set up new payees on bank accounts - maybe looking to change address on account??

stragglebod

Presumably in the background the scammers were clicking a 'forgotten password' link for one of your accounts login pages.

The site sends your mobile a text with a security code to check that it's you attempting to reset the security. Only by reading out the code to the scammers they can pass the check and take control of your account.

Exemplar

Ian011 wrote: »

One very important point to note about CLI. The number shown on your screen is NOT the number that the call came from, it is merely a "presentation number". There are many circumstances where this has been programmed by the caller to show a different phone number other than the one they are actually calling from.

Phone calls can only ever genuinely "come from" a landline, mobile or VoIP connection. Where a non-geographic number is shown on caller display, this is usually the central "inbound" number of a callcentre. This masks the individual landline phone number that called.

In genuine circumstances, the displayed phone number acts as an invitation as to the number to call back on should the call be dropped or it be a missed call. Scammers also change the displayed number, such as in the "wangiri" (one ring and cut) scam designed to trick people into ringing expensive premium rate numbers that generate reveue for the scammers.

As the number shown on screen can be changed by the caller, it proves absolutely nothing about whether the call is genuine. Scammers regularly spoof the numbers used by banks and card companies in an attempt to appear genuine. The number shown on screen cannot alone ever give any indication as to whether a call is genuine.

All of this! I work for a specialist telecoms company and we have satellite phones display their CLI's as a London number. Dead easy to do.