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Fake calls from Virgin Media "technical department"?

jeremyrh
Tuning in

I have been receiving calls on my Virgin landline from someone that sounds like they are in a call centre in India saying that they have "received reports of an error with my router".  They then go on to ask what lights are on my router. Maybe I am paranoid, but at this point I hang up.

Is there any way to verify if such calls are legitimate and not scams of some sort?

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

goslow
Alessandro Volta

Hanging up is the best approach. They are scam calls as VM do not initiate tech support calls in this way.

Browse through this forum and 'Home phone' and you will find dozens of similar topics with the same issue described.

See where this Helpful Answer was posted

7 REPLIES 7

goslow
Alessandro Volta

Hanging up is the best approach. They are scam calls as VM do not initiate tech support calls in this way.

Browse through this forum and 'Home phone' and you will find dozens of similar topics with the same issue described.

OFCOM FAKE CALLS

I have had 6 call in a month (feb/march 2021, the latest today claiming to be Ofcom, my router IP is hacked, please press 5 for BT and 9 for others.

Sound like an Indian call centre. They are voip telphone numbers and can not be traced, but concerning that they can so easily get through to the virgin landline phone, perhaps virgin should block these voip numbers coming from india.

I have had at least 14 over the last few years, I just ignore them but some people might easily be tempted to press the 5 or 9 button.

alf28

Paulina_Z
Forum Team (Retired)
Forum Team (Retired)

Hi @ALF28,

 

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. 

 

You're absolutely right to ignore calls from unknown numbers. We're sorry to hear that you've been impacted by these calls so much.

 

As you mentioned before, these calls cannot be traced, but we're doing our best to keep our customers safe.

 

You can take a look at our website to take a look at some fraudulent call precautions you can take.

 

Keep us updated on any other issues you may encounter.

 

Thanks!

Paulina_Z
Forum Team

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tarbyonline
Just joined

My father just received one of these calls to his ex directory number.  Thankfully I was in the house at the time and he passed it to me as I'm reasonably technically competent. I was immediately suspicious as the accents sounded Indian, but played along out of curiosity.  The "excuse" for calling was irregular traffic coming from the modem and that they needed to fix the issue so we got a faster speed.

Initially the caller was female.  She asked what lights were visible on the modem, etc.  After a while she asked if I had access to a computer so they could diagnose the issue [ALARM BELLS].  After confirming I had a computer she transferred me to her "technical supervisor".  He got me to navigate to the W3C validator and check the virign media website.  Of course, it produced lots of errors (you should fix that virgin - missing image alt tags and javascript errors galore).  At this stage he asked me to navigate to the any desk website and download the software so he could fix the problem.  Having found this thread, I informed him I knew this was a scam and hung up.

The concerning thing is these people seemed very professional and were obviously well trained in guiding people through the process.  Evidently they are trying to pry on the elderly and those less technically savvy.  Its a shame there's no way to stop these calls.  

Graham_A
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

The fraudsters have no idea who they are calling as the numbers are just auto generated for them by calling software.  But, I agree they do come across as professional and sadly a lot of people get taken in by it.  If they didn't the calls would soon become unprofitable and eventually die out altogether.

________________________________
Graham

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@tarbyonline wrote:

<snip>

The concerning thing is these people seemed very professional and were obviously well trained in guiding people through the process.  Evidently they are trying to pry on the elderly and those less technically savvy.  Its a shame there's no way to stop these calls.  


You already seem pretty savvy as to the warning signs of a scam call but, FWIW, VM don't make unsolicited tech support calls nor do they ever require remote access to devices. Anyone phoning and requesting this is a scam caller.

I have used this device for the last 18 months or so

https://www.truecall.co.uk/category-s/116.htm

and have had zero scam calls get past it since installing it.


@tarbyonline wrote:

He got me to navigate to the W3C validator and check the virign media website.


 

Ha that is brilliant. Would be great if this scammer manages to call a VM web developer one day and tells them to check virginmedia.com, that would be hilarious.

431 errors on virginmedia.com

Thought I'd try putting a competitor, communityfibre.co.uk has only 16 errors.