New Phone Scam

New scam. Just received a call on my landline: "Hello. Please do not hang up. Your business has not been verified by Google. Please press 1." I hung up at that point. Pressing 1 will likely ensure automatic charges to your phone account. A heads-up.
The dbags are getting inventive.

 

If I don't recognize the number I won't answer. If it is important they can leave a message.

 

Yes. Normally we screen calls, but, I am expecting an important call in the next little while.

 

This is a nasty one thanks for the heads up

My 86yo mum just got scammed in the last fortnight. Just before Christmas she was compulsorily connected to the NBN (National Broadband Network) and there have been so many problems with the NBN roll out that the government has now mandated that the Telcos can't sell data speed plans that can't be achieved with hefty fines. The Telcos were selling 100MB/s plans and 50MB/s plans in areas that they could only ever deliver a maximum speed of 15MB/s due to problems in that area.
Now to the scam. Mum was called supposedly by some government department doing an audit of her new connection and if it wasn't at the 50MB/s she was paying for then she was eligible for an immediate AU$500 cash rebate and then possibly a 12 month free subscription to the new plan to which she would be switched. Long story short mum called me and I said to unplug her pc immediately and I would be over. They had upgraded Teamviewer and changed all the master passwords. They had installed a keylogger and they had created a hidden and encrypted partition that was sending data via a dcom process.
After cleaning mum's pc we then called her two banks because the accounts were locked due to them detecting fraudulent activity.
Mum went to each bank the following day and got new logins with new passwords and a new set of ID questions plus she linked both accounts to be notified by SMS to her new mobile number. Now all transactions over AU$1,000 need to verified with a code that needs to be entered within 5 minutes of receiving it.
When mum was talking to the banks she was told that the scumbags had tried to transfer AU$10,000 out of each of her accounts and luckily they didn't have enough info to succeed and blew the number of login attempts which caused the banks to lock her accounts until she came in personally with full ID.
You have got to be so careful these days

 

My new favorite with live scammers (who always mispronounce my name) is to initially act flustered and blurt out "WHY ARE YOU CALLING!" When they get out a sentence or two, I turn on the fake crocodile tears and blurt out "I'm his SON! He DIED three days ago and we're going to be late for the FUNERAL!" then slam the phone down.

Knowing this false information, I hope their next attempt to scam me will be done using a Ouiji board.

 

I've had an iPhone for a year today. It's from the business I work for. These calls have been since day 1. That and 'Your business has been approved for $100,000 guaranteed loan.' Or 'we can lower your credit card interest rate'. Or 'your warranty is about to expire.'. They can't collect on any extra charge to this phone, so I play along with them till they get aware and hang up.
So far , the company hasn't said anything about cutting spam calls short so I figure since I've been interrupted, I'm gonna waste some of their precious commission time right back!

My regular phone 'Tracphone' almost never gets these kinds of calls.