Quality Check call on my virgin media services

[josephmcginley]

So today I had a call from someone claiming to be a virgin media rep.  And his reason for the call, was to do a quality control check on my services.   Now he knew my full name, now always get suspicious of this, and if its a scam call, how did he get my details

He now goes on, and asks me to confirm some details, now I thought he was going to ask me the security questions, but

I was asked if I could confirm the first line of my address, well thats not something Im going to do, as it sounds like a scam call.  So I ended up hanging up on the call, so anyone else had similar calls

[goslow]

Yes, certainly sounds very scam-like. Usual routine is they claim to have 'detected problems with your router'. VM does not make this kind of outbound tech support call out of the blue.

You were wise to be wary. If they call again, just hang up without talking to them.

[josephmcginley]

On checking the tel no, and googling the number, this number comes back as

08001836411 comes back for virgin media

Now the sales reps, need to be trained properly, like dont ask the customer, can you provide the first line in your address.  Same things as for security questions, and as for me, cant remember the last time, security questions were used with me

If it is a genuine virgin media sales rep, this person should have access to my account, and from the account, he should be able to tell me, the following.  My last payment how much did I pay, if I took any on-demand service, what was the film

[Hayley_S]

Hello @josephmcginley,

Welcome back, thanks for posting.

I am sorry for the issue with the call you received.

We still need to do data protection on a out going call, to make sure the account holder is the one who answered the call.

Many thanks,

[goslow]

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@josephmcginley wrote:

On checking the tel no, and googling the number, this number comes back as

08001836411 comes back for virgin media

<snip>

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Unfortunately, topics about calls from these 0800 VM sales numbers get mentioned on here very regularly.

This one (about another 0800 VM number) stretches to an impressive 26 pages

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Security-matters/Calls-from-0800-052-1251/td-p/3765121/page/26

You have no way of knowing whether the call is a genuine one of not due to the possibility of scammers faking the caller ID. In the above topic, a number of the posts are certainly complaining about scam callers, another group are certainly complaining about VM sales agents and another group have no idea if they have been called by scammers or VM.

Since you, as a VM customer, have no way at all of telling if the caller is genuinely VM or a scammer, then the idea of giving out any personal/security info to an unsolicited caller is a total non-starter, so in my view you were 100% correct to end the call.

If you don't want to receive sales and marketing calls from VM, then opt out of marketing preferences in 'My Virgin Media' and also sign up with the TPS. If you have a phone which can block numbers then start blocking the VM sales numbers when they come in. Sadly there are a lot of these 0800 sales numbers you might have to block and opting out via MVM doesn't always guarantee the calls will stop.