jasonwrxowner

Received from a friend - Don't know how reliable this is - but what a scam.

Police Report!

The reason this is working so well is it plays on your good will! Picture the scene:- You are sitting at home and there is a knock at the door. On answering it you are confronted by a respectable looking woman in a suit, who is slightly distressed. She explains that her car has broken down further down the road and she needs to contact her husband to come to her aid. Is it at all possible to use your phone to call him? You allow her to use the phone, but being the suspicious type you stand with her as she makes the call. She dials the number, and asks to be put through to Mr Smith / Brown / Stevens (Whatever). She holds the line for about thirty seconds. She continues, "In that case can you ask him to leave the meeting for a minute I need to speak to him quite urgently."
She apologises again and explains they are getting him out of a meeting. A couple of minutes go by and she starts to speak to her husband.

She explains the situation to him, tells him what has happened to the car, is annoyed because she now can't get to her meeting, and asks what she should do now. She listens for a few seconds and then says, "Well as soon as the meeting finishes can you come to Cardiff Road / Leicester Road / Surrey Street (Whatever), where the car has broken down. Another few seconds go by, "OK, I'll see you in about twenty minutes then." She puts the phone down, and thanks you ever so much for your kind assistance, even offering you a pound for your trouble, but of course you decline, it's no trouble.
She leaves and everything is fine. Or is it? The day or week before knocking on your door she set up her own premium rate line with a telephone company at the cost of about £150, and she has dictated that calls to that number should be charged at £50 per minute. She has dialed that number.
The conversation she has had with her "husband" is entirely fictitious; there is a pre-recorded voice message on the other end to give you the impression she is talking to someone. She has been on the phone for about five minutes, that call just cost you £250, the majority of which goes into her pocket, and the first you know about it is when you get your bill a month later. To rub a bit of salt into the wound, she hasn't even committed a criminal offence. You've given her permission to use your phone. This has been reported on 5 occasions in Luton in the last couple of weeks.

Would anyone reading this, please pass it on to friends and colleagues etc., otherwise it could cost someone a lot of money. PC Paul Toseland Corby Business Anti-Crime Network Administrator

neilbbb

this is a hoax

please see the previous threads on here.....

RaZe-=Buzz=-

No, sorry, thats been on here before, and if I remember it was de-bunked as an "urban myth"

Someone found out the highest charge for phone lines was something like £1.50 per min I think, so it isnt possible....

Still, its a good story , and thanks for thinking of us all..


DISCLAIMER - I may be wrong, I usualy am, but on this occassion I dont think so. Anything I type should be declared null and void after about 10 seconds

MarkO

FFS. Any chance we can sin-bin people from the BBS if they post this again? Or perhaps we should have a 'sticky' thread at the top of each forum, mentioning this so people who are too thick to search the web and find out about it can immediately realise it's a hoax. [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

jasonwrxowner

MarkO...Why so harsh. As I said I recieved it from a friend and by posting it I thought that I may in some way have been doing fellow posters a favour. I don't have either the time or the inclanation to search everytime I want to post to ensure that the subject has not been previously covered. Sorry if you have wasted your time reading it but if it had been genuine and you had avoided a scam then I think that your attitude may be a little different. If you knew that this had been done before then surley a constructive comment would hve been more appropriate.

Maon finished......I am now ducking!

Reffro

This isn't exactly a hoax, the PC named at the bottom of the message is a real copper and he did send this out. But he didn't check his facts and was reprimanded later by his senior officers after they received numerous complaints from the public.........

MarkO

Why not? If I posted that all-out nuclear war had just started, I doubt anyone would be too chuffed if it turned out to be bollocks. You posted something similarly daft, so why whouldn't I slate you?
And do you believe and pass on everything that every friend tells you? There is so much **** being posted around the internet - spam mail, virus haoxes, and rubbish on BBSes. If people just took a couple of minutes to check whether stuff was real or not, tit'd all go away.

Consider the fact that of the 16,000 members on this board, perhaps 50 have read your post and gone away and emailed it back to other people, or propagated it on to other BBSes, wasting more bandwidth and making more people worried about something which simply isn't true.

Then don't just believe it as gospel and don't post it.

But it's so patently obvious from the description of the scam that it's likely to be complete rubbish. There are no premium rate numbers that charge £50 per minute - it's simply not allowed by oftel. And it would only take one complaint from the person who was scammed like this and BT would come down on the owner of the premium rate number like a ton of bricks. It's common sense!!!

But the main reason it's so irritating is that this rubbish has been posted on this BBS in this forum at least 4 times in the last 2-3 weeks. [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

MarkO

Okay, so the PC fell for the hoax too. Doesn't stop it being a hoax.

I'll bet he first received it via an anonymous email...

jasonwrxowner

Fair point MarkO, however I have only been using the board since Sunday so I was unaware that this type of posting was such a problem. However, I do now.

Cheers.

Mungo

MarkO - you could always ignore duplicate posts instead of giving yourself a hernia...

Clarebabes

MarkO, please come to the Muppet Forum. Could really do with someone with your sense of humour!

RaZe-=Buzz=-

LOL Mark!! Go for it SON!!!

ps - you DID put me in your will didnt you? Dont want the heart attack until AFTER thats been confirmed..

DavidRB

You could always do a bit of research on your own before accepting E-mails as being 100% truthful verbotim:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/scams/phone.htm.

I check EVERY E-mail like this against snopes and they are invariably untrue.

It's interesting what people will believe if it's written down...

EvilBevel

I even doubt that TBH... ANY message with "pass this on to friends" etc is bound to be bollox.

Think about it.