Another scammer call

[g4eqz]

Just had a scammer call from a guy with an almost unintelligible indian accent claiming to be from Virgin who said there was something wrong with my router. I checked and the speeds were normal. I strung the idiot along for a bit and he said there were people trying to break into my router and asked me to type "what is my ip address" into google. I gave him a made up public IP address. He then asked if my IP address showed public or private - I told him it was public and he said that is the problem and I will get my very senior manager to talk to you to tell you how to fix it.

At this point I told him I believed he was a scammer and to go away whilst increasing the size of his family 😀

I then did the Virgin automated check on my router and it said everything was OK. 

Unfortunately Virgin do employ a lot of indian people with almost unitelligable accents and whilst I have absolutely no problem with indian call centers I do expect that I should be able to understand them without constantly asking them to repeat what they said last. I have worked with many indians and some of them speak better english than I do.

[nodrogd]

VM will NEVER make technical calls of this nature. A lot of the scam call operations work from India, so it’s not surprising they will sound the same as the legit ones VM uses along with other UK operations.

I would beware of being too abusive with these callers however. These call centres will think nothing of cloning an abusive respondents number & using it to bulk dial thousands of other UK numbers in ongoing scam attempts. This inevitably results in you risking getting loads of abusive calls yourself from other victims thinking you are the scammer that just called them.

Cloned numbers also get posted on public forums like this one (though we try and get these removed quickly others may not).

[Anonymous]

I use these guys https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ 

[PaulChill]

I have just had one of these again (last time was last year).  The telephone number was (apparently) [removed].

Question - how do these scammers know that they are calling a Virgin Media customer ?

 [MOD EDIT: Personal and private information has been removed from this post. Please do not post personal or private information in your public posts. Please review the Forum Guidelines]

[Hayley_S]

Hello everybody,

Welcome to the forums community!

I am sorry to see that people are receiving scam calls, I can understand that this is very frustrating and confusing.

But unfortunately, we are limited to what we can do about this.

However, please do visit our website on how to deal with scam/fraud calls. I hope this helps.

Many thanks,

[iball]

I've just had a call exactly the same, about my router not being secure......the person didn't know my name when I asked them, so hung up. Call was from number 0049293904409

[nodrogd]

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@PaulChill wrote:

I have just had one of these again (last time was last year).  The telephone number was (apparently) 0121xxxxxxx

Question - how do these scammers know that they are calling a Virgin Media customer ?

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I have asked the mods to remove the cloned phone number you have posted. The real user has nothing to do with the scam.

Do they know you are a VM customer? No. They are guessing. VM are allocated blocks of numbers in every STD code area they operate from in the country. Lists of these numbers are published by OFCOM & are freely available to anyone visiting their website. The scammers simply block-dial these numbers & assume that if you have one you are a VM customer. The only time it goes wrong is if you have transferred your number when you moved provider, as the number always remains in the ownership of the original provider.

[MrHalfAsleep]

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@iball wrote:

I've just had a call exactly the same, about my router not being secure......the person didn't know my name when I asked them, so hung up. Call was from number 0049293904409

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00+49 is pretending to be from Germany.  This is a more recent evolution in scams where the scammers learn German (and other European languages) to target Germans in Germany, or other respective countries.

[MrHalfAsleep]

I got a call earlier this morning from my 'gas/electric supplier'.  My sister answered and gave the phone to me, by the time I said "hello" the caller hung up.  It wasn't a legit number.  Stay vigilant folks.

[Travis_M]

Hi @MrHalfAsleep

Thank you for your reply

Sorry to hear about the scam call and thank you for remaining vigilant and making others aware of this. Have a great day.

Regards