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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

New Credit Card Scam

By Ted Twietmeyer
A new telephone credit card scam is underway to con you of your credit card information. And forget about the phone company caring about it, too.

You will receive a phone call from a strange, surreal phone number such as 407 000 9821, according to your caller ID. However, the name part of your caller ID display will probably be blank. A recorded female voice tells you that because of your prompt payment history, you're eligible to lower your credit card interest rate. If you're interested please press 1 (message, gender and number to press will probably vary.) Out of curiosity to see what this scam was about, I pressed the number. At that point, no information was provided to the caller so no real harm could take place.

A few months ago, I re-entered our phone number on the national "Do not call list" for telemarketers. But as you probably already know, telemarketers are now ignoring that list. This list has gone the same way as licensing citizens band users.

A number of other telephone operators in the room can be heard talking to other people in the background. This is strongly suggestive of a "boiler room" type operation. A man answers who is apparently reading from a script. Then the question was asked, "What would you say your current card balance is?"

I responded with "If you are calling me, then you should already have that information." The next thing I heard was his handset slamming down which disconnected the call.

There is no seven digit phone number that begins with 000. The number group from 000 to 199 is reserved for phone company internal lines.

A reverse phone number check with whitepages.com resulted in confirming this fact by giving the following message from their website:

No listing was found for the phone number you entered.
A valid 7-digit phone number is required for this search.

This provides more proof that the 000 is clearly a fraud. Somehow, these scammers have defeated the caller ID system which is *supposed* to originate from phone company switching system computers. Perhaps they have tapped into a trunk line somewhere.

When I reported this to the phone company Frontier Communication's fraud division , I was told they cannot trace the call. I then said, "Look, I know about the data collection system you already have in place for NSA. Of course it doesn't officially exist, but don't you have access to the data you collect for them?"
The response to that statement was a terse answer, interrupting me while I was speaking claiming there's nothing they can do. The man also falsely claimed that if the number on my telephone display is wrong they cannot trace it either. He continued to argue with me until I told him that his group was useless and I ended the call.

This is utter nonsense. There is an automatic record made in computers of every call that goes through every telephone company, including the caller's origin and phone number. It is this information they actually have, but claim they do not.

So beware- there are new fraudsters on the block, and there doesn't appear to be anyone that will do anything about them. Once they have your personal information the identity theft will be complete. And you won't know they hit you until you receive a card statement in the mail next month, or even worse, when your card is declined at a store, gas station or restaurant putting you into highly embarrasing position with insufficient cash in your pocket to pay the bill. There are countless stories of individuals who have spent a year or more and thousands of dollars just to re-gain their identity after identity theft.

We know that Frontier is at least one of the phone companies which is clearly unmotivated to protect it's customers, and will not pursue this type of fraud.

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