The folks in UD’s Development Office report receiving a phone call that could be a variation on the phone support scam we mentioned last month.
I just received a telephone call from a man who claimed to be “Tom Collins,” with UD Business Solutions. He said his boss asked him to call me to get the serial number from my laser deskjet printer. I looked at the caller ID and it showed “PRIVATE NUMBER”, so I asked him if he was a UD employee. When he replied “yes,” I asked for his boss’s name and phone number saying that I would call him back. He then hung up on me.
This employee recognized that this phone conversation could have been the beginning of a scam support call. She knew not to give out serial numbers or confidential information to an unknown caller. Nice move asking for the phone number to call back!
Good job to the employee! It should be how everybody’s supposed to handle suspicious calls. Healthy skepticism will do a lot to avoid being scammed.
Well, unfortunately, these scams continue because by assuming an identity and posing as an employee of a reputable company, somehow, scammers are able to convince somebody to provide a sensitive information over the phone. I remember reading similar reports posted at Callercenter.com and it’s a little discomforting that scammers can easily call people, try to scam them and get away with it.
Isn’t there a preventive step more assuring than government reminders? Like being able to trace calls faster and catching the culprits? Or maybe alerting the authorities right away as soon as the call becomes suspicious?
Yesterday, I talked to another UD employee on the phone. He told me that he has had three calls like this one in the past 10 days or so: one at work and two at home.
Scams like this one and the one we wrote about in March (http://sites.udel.edu/phishing/2012/03/07/international-phone-scam-lands-in-delaware/) are multiplying. Korinne may be right. Alerting the authorities may be a good idea. Of course, a lot of these scam calls are routed so that the origin is masked.
News reports indicate that this kind of scam is STILL going on all over the English-speaking world. A sample report:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/story/2012/04/24/tby-computer-virus-scam.html
Even though this report is from Canada, it’s the same pattern: the scammers make multiple calls to an area code/exchange combination for a while. In short, if there’s one call in an area, it’s likely there will be more.