A few days ago, we were targeted by a team of sales people, who use fraudulent and very aggressive sales methods when trying to convince people in Spain to move to another internet provider.
Here’s how they work:
- From routing databases, they have information about what fixed phone numbers are the customers of Telefonica (i.e. using the services of the brand Movistar).
- From the telephone book (or some leaked data), they know the name of the account holder.
- Next, they place a phone call to the fixed number in question, where they have set the caller ID to the number of Movistar call centers. There is a small difference, though: the number is marked as being international format, and will therefore be presented as 001004 or +1004, rather than the real number 1004.
- And now they tell you something like: “We’re from Movistar. Due to technical reasons, we need to disconnect your internet service tonight. But we’ve made an arrangement with Jazztel, so that if you decide to move to their services, then you won’t be troubled by any down time.”
- In order to make the following steps harder to trace over the network, they then ask for your mobile number.
- Next, a different voice will call you from “Jazztel” and start selling. They will push on the point that you need to make up your mind immediately. If you ask them to call back a bit later, they’ll say they have so many people to cater for, that you then will end up without service for a while…
Unfortunately, I wasn’t at home when this happened. But, luckily, my wife felt that these guys were too pushy. So while she was pretending to search for her bank account number, she called Movistar from a different and line and got confirmation that our subscription has no issues, and that they’ve seen this kind of fraud several times.
