Forum Discussion

kazzax's avatar
kazzax
Joining in
11 months ago

Virgin/O2 merger new sim card. Scam or for real?

I just had a (landline) call from what I'm pretty sure was a scammer, but they usually just hang up when challenged, and this guy didn't.

He told me he was calling from O2, and that (due to a merger with Virgin Media) my (O2) sim card was about to stop working. He wanted to send me a new one. He was asking for my email address, 'to confirm my identity' and I told him no, he could email me at the address they have on file, or text me from an official O2 account, and I would confirm my ID that way, but however as much I told him I wasn't going to confirm my identity until he confirmed his, he just kept asking for my email address. When I insisted there was no way I was going to give out any information, he said 'OK, then can I cancel your sim as from Monday' to which I said 'whatever' and hung up.

It seems like bad practice that O2 would call from an unidentified landline number, and ask for information they should already have on file, but it would be a pain in the arse if my sim card did stop working.

This feels like scam 101, but I thought I'd better check...

4 Replies

  • Lee_R's avatar
    Lee_R
    Icon for Forum Team rankForum Team
    11 months ago

    Hi kazzax thanks for posting and welcome to our community.

    Thanks for following your instincts and acting on the side of caution.  We'd ask that you reach out to our colleagues at O2, to give you the reassurance.  You can do so by their contact methods here.  Or their community page can be found here.  And you could reach out to them on X (formerly known as Twitter) and there handle is @O2.

    Regards

    Lee_R

  • jellysheep's avatar
    jellysheep
    On our wavelength
    4 days ago

    This scam is still happening as I had the same thing happen to me on 1st August this year (2025). In my case, they were wanting to know if I would be in on the following Monday as they said they needed to send me a new SIM card due to the Virgin and O2 merger. They texted a security code to my mobile number which looked like the genuine O2 Security Warning text followed by a separate security code text that we usually get from O2. It even appeared in my iPhone's same O2 UK text history as all my other genuine O2 texts I'd had previously with security codes. The person on the call messed up a bit, though, as part of the second text wording said not to share the code even with O2 staff, and so I was refusing to share it with them. I hung up planning to verify this with Virgin and O2 directly and I was immediately being called again from a different number that looked like a standard mobile number. I have reported this to somebody at O2/Virgin Media who confirmed that nobody had been trying to contact me or had sent a code. 

    • Matthew_ML's avatar
      Matthew_ML
      Icon for Forum Team rankForum Team
      4 days ago

      Hey jellysheep, thank you for reaching out and we are sorry to hear about this sim card issue.

      Please can you confirm for us the number which is texting you?

  • Roger_Gooner's avatar
    Roger_Gooner
    Alessandro Volta
    4 days ago

    It's always a red flag when you get an unexpected call from someone telling you that you need a new X (replace X with SIM card, bank account, etc).