Amazon scam..almost got caught

[Dowser]

House phone rang and a woman says your amazon prime subscription is due to end, true
She speaks very fast and not a native English speaker and the line is very noisy so I can barely make out what she says
So she says I will help you cancel it.
I ask a question..and she says if you cooperate with me , I will help you cancel it

Now I didn’t like that word...so I’m on red alert .
She wants to know if i have a mobile, tablet or computer ..so I said tablet

So she’s asking me to go into an App Store and download an app

So, I find it..and then in small print, thank god I had my glasses on, I saw , screen sharer

I said, hang on, I’ll have a word with my husband.
He said, that’s not right, it’s a scam, so he took over the call..and I went on amazon website and cancelled the subscription in seconds and screen shotted it.

Anyway he got annoyed with her and put the phone down.
Talk about aggressive, she rang back 5 times
We unplugged the phone in the end

The number was 016 something and looks like it. Could be related to a Vietnamese company vienettel or something . It was a Buxton area code

We put the phone back in again..and another call came through
This time it was 01421 which isn’t assigned to any area.

Anyway, just spoken to my son in law and they had one today too and he was in a shop and heard a guy on the phone getting stroppy with amazon.

I can’t believe how plausible she was..I’d have been more on my guard, if my blooming subscription wasn’t due to end in August.

They are getting too clever these people.

They are devious. There was a program on channel 5 in the week "how to stop nuisance calls" which looked at the methods used - a lot was repeated content from previous programs but still worth a watch if you didn't see it.

In terms of banks. When texting Barclays always tell me to go to the website and search for X, Halifax send a link.

Has anyone else had a similar message re Amazon prime on their Alexa speaker? I had one yesterday afternoon, it suddenly sparked into life and said my prime was about to renew?

[quote daisychain01]@Dowser I can recommend a phone by BT called BT Call Minder which filters out all nuisance scam calls.

It works by having a directory where you store your contacts then any calls that come through not recognised it asks the caller to say their name and wait to be put through. It cut out 100% of our scam and marketing calls immediately because they never stay on the line and announce themselves. We were hounded by scammers before that.

It's a game changer![/quote]
@ThickFast you had the name correct, it's BT Call Guardian.

Great phone isn't it. They need to have the same functionality for mobiles now!

Yeah BT call guardian is the best. Anyone proper but on a withheld number, like the doctor, just announces themselves and gets through so it’s great. Haven’t had a single scam call since we got the phone.

This is why I don’t have a land line.

It really pisses me off that a we pay so much for a phone line and have to put up with it , even more annoying is the call sometimes comes up with a local number . I almost never answer my phone and I would get rid of it altogether, but the mobile signal in my house is not very good .

I had five calls from the BT scammers this morning. On the last one, although it was a recorded message, I told them to fuck off and die in agony. No calls since

Im a little bit annoyed that i never seem to get scam calls on my landline...id love to play along with a scammer...let him think i was going to give him all my money etc....something to do whilst im still furloughed.

@daisychain.

Another reason is that most of these places use an autodialer that makes the calls and then if the call is answered, it gets transferred to an agent to deal with. Hence the silent calls you sometimes get if there isn't an agent free to connect to the call.

The requirement to state a name possibly gets timed out even before the agent connects.

I'd find it suspicious that amazon want to help me cancel.
All of the subscriptions rely on people forgetting to cancel, its how they make money.

Indeed. But there seems to be an uptick in these scams lately. Creating a sense of urgency by telling people their Prime/Netflix/Paypal will be closed unless they do something is a classic scammer technique. Indeed it's a classic sales technique.

[quote WaxOnFeckOff]@daisychain.

Another reason is that most of these places use an autodialer that makes the calls and then if the call is answered, it gets transferred to an agent to deal with. Hence the silent calls you sometimes get if there isn't an agent free to connect to the call.

The requirement to state a name possibly gets timed out even before the agent connects. [/quote]
That's interesting, @WaxOnFeckOff, thank you. Either which way, I don't end up rushing for the phone thinking it's someone nice calling me, only to find out it's some twat in Hyderabad in an offshore call centre giving me the bums rush. I'm now used to listening out to hear who it is first!

I rarely get any anymore - member of the Telephone Preference thing etc.

When I do, it goes something like:

Them: Hello I'm calling to discuss your recent accident
Me: Great! let me just do a quick security check
Them:
Me: If you could just give me your full name, date of birth and the first line of your address and post code and if you have a reference number there too that would be good.
Them:

Occasionally you get a more persistent one that tells you that it's them that needs the information not you - this can be fun if you have the time to keep playing.

I once genuinely had an agent for Amazon from India on their chat facility when I was making a complaint, telling me he wishes he knew all the fancy chat and things to say to make me happy and go away Not to blow my own trumpet or anything but I'm great at complaining.

My 80 year old mil got one of these calls while I was there. She was all set to do what they asked until I literally grabbed the phone from her and asked them exactly what they were doing. They hung up straight away.

Have you also filled in a form for a tax rebate, reinput your bank details for the TV licence and let a nice man from microsoft take control of your computer?
I had an email yesterday telling me that the payment for our TV licence couldn't be processed. Funny, as my DH is 78, we don't pay until the deal ends in August!

We binned our landline we must have been part of the talk talk data breach as we had Indians ringing and shouting at us up to 5 times a day. Apparently our details sold round Delhi. We both wfh and need to concentrate so the phone had to go

Slightly different one today - account had been used to place an order over £1000 and flagged as suspicious, so would be frozen unless we pressed 1 ...

@LIZS

We had that one yesterday.