cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Router problem Scam ?

Taffytone
Joining in

Just recieved a call claiming to be from VM  , calling me "sir" ..no names  saying I have router issues and that I'm not receiving true speeds , told me to do a speed test which I did then Google W3C Validator ....I did Google it but didn't go any further and hung up .They immediately rang back on a completely different number . Hope I hung up in time , but VM need to block these people or give us an option of blocking numbers to our VM landlines . But it's different numbers all the time . TR

2 REPLIES 2

jem101
Superstar

@Taffytone 

Well, as I am sure you already know, this wasn’t VM at all but a scammer. I assume this was on your landline, now what they do is use publicly available tools to see which supplier a particular phone number has been allocated to, so they check your number, find it belongs to VM, and make an educated guess that you probably are using VM for broadband and act accordingly. I promise you that the same person calls the next number in their list and claims to be from BT or TalkTalk or whoever!

This method does fall apart if you have ported your number from one supplier to another, but the scammers will often quickly make something plausible up ie.’this is BT support, oh you are with Virgin Media, well they use BT connectivity, in fact everyone uses BT’ so….’ and just assume that most people don’t know any different.

Often they try to verify who they are by asking you to check a specific value on a Windows PC and they will tell you what it says, hoping of course, that the unsuspecting punter doesn’t know that every PC on the planet has the same value!

Now your experience is a new one on me. The W3C checker just verifies that a particular website is properly formatted and configured,  not that it actually is what it claims to be. So I would speculate that they ask you to download that tool, run it against the site they provide, it comes back as ‘well yes the code is fine’ and then they say, ‘see now you can believe we are who we say we are so now, please hand over all of your bank details’ OK probably not quite as bluntest as that, but you get the point.

Look, no ISP ever, ever, calls their customers out of the blue and tells them there is a problem with their connection -because they don’t know even if you have a problem, if you ever get such a call, it is always, always a scam!

nodrogd
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@Taffytone wrote:

Hope I hung up in time , but VM need to block these people or give us an option of blocking numbers to our VM landlines . But it's different numbers all the time . TR


The vast majority of numbers used by scammers are clones of genuine users numbers. Blocking them would therefore more often than not block genuine calls, & scammers change these numbers daily. They can even call you FROM YOUR OWN NUMBER. That is how backwards our old fixed line phone system is, & why it must now be replaced with an internet based system. VM are already upgrading customers to lines that plug into their hubs as the first stage of the switchover. But for now the only thing you can do is buy a device or phone that provides call filtering services like the one linked below:

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

VM 350BB 2xV6 & Landline. Freeview/Freesat HD, ASDA/Tesco PAYG Mobile. Cable customer since 1993

I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media. Learn more

Have I helped? Click Mark as Helpful Answer or use Kudos to say thanks