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The Wangiri Phone Scam

This is the call back scam, which has risen to epidemic levels in Ireland.

Ireland’s phone operators say that tens of thousands of scam mobile phone calls are sweeping across Ireland in an “unprecedented” surge.

The calls, often have international prefixes including +231 (Liberia), +269 (The Comoros Islands), or +43 (Austria) and are intended to trick people into phoning back at premium rates.

The numbers are high cost international numbers and the fraudsters will get paid for each call back. The fraudsters will try to keep you on the line for as many minutes as possible.

The scam is known as a ‘wangiri’ call, (means one ring) because the mobile phone typically rings just once or twice.

The scammers hope that people will automatically call back without looking too closely at the number.

The telecoms watchdog admits there is no easy way to identify such calls but advise not calling back unless you know the number that called you and certainly do not call back if left a blank message.

Some mobile operators do block these scam numbers as they are identified and that stops them  from calling their customers and blocks their customers from returning the call.

If your receive such calls, then notify your phone company of the calling numbers.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.

Stupidest Scam or Spam of the Week

An email titled ‘No More Veggies. Substitute This”

This is from Tyler Bramlett, who seems devoid of basic common sense.

He’s pushing a drink made of greens, that is called Organify and he seems to believe it is very healthy.

Not eating vegetables cannot possibly be a healthy action to take.

He goes on to claim he gets sent around 35 supplements each week by people wanting him to endorse their products but he only picks 1 or 2 to do so.

Drinking apple juice is not as healthy as eating apples. Drinking green vegetable water is not as healthy as eating green vegetables. It’s very simple really.

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Time-Wasters Update

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days?

An email from Sara asking for full-time work or to be an intern in order to gain experience in the field. But she has no idea who we are or what we do so it’s just a scam.

Another message supposedly from Whatsapp (there’s a few of these every week) telling us our trial subscription has ended. But we don’t have such a subscription so it cannot be ending and the email is from lifeteen.com which always means it’s a scam.

Mr. A James Lyon offering a free mortgage review. But he works for a Marketing company so he’s just trying to find leads to sell to mortgage companies. No thanks.

This email starts ”Did You hear the News?” and goes on about a man assaulted at a bar as he tried to collect his 5th winnings on the lottery. A surprising but still pitiful attempt to claim someone knows the secret to winning the lottery. It’s simple – the more you play the more chance you have of winning. But also the more you play the more you lose is the general experience.

Now a man who had discovered the secret that Big Pharma has tried to keep from us – the  cure for diabetes. Nope. The scammers only secret is their identity while they try to con money from people.

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The Fundraising Preference Service

Charities have long been an established part of life, carrying out everything from hospice care to cancer research to caring for orphaned children to seeking responsible treatment of animals etc.

In Britain there are well over 200,000 registered charities and estimated to be a lot more that aren’t registered as they are too small.

Charities have a good name and do a good job but in recent years in the UK, many large charities became too focussed on collecting money and using unscrupulous methods to do so.

From reports of chuggers (the charity collectors in the street who stop you and wont let go till you’ve signed up) to the ones that trade names of donors so they can each cold call more people to those using boiler room tactics on cold calling. Some people have reported getting hundreds of such calls per week and being frightened to leave their phone connected.

There is now the Fundraising Preference Service.

You can register online at https://public.fundraisingpreference.org.uk/

Or call 0300 303 3517. You register yourself (or another person) so as to not be bothered by the charities you elect to block.

You need to supply your name and address and pick which charities to block.  That’s all there is to it.

You can register someone else on the service and they will be sent a message informing them of the registration. This is so that carers and family members and neighbours can register people unable to do so themselves.

Most of the charities have learned to behave better following the bad publicity but this will hopefully make them more responsible as well and stop a lot of the unnecessary bothering of people that still goes on.

In its first days, the FRP was receiving 114 requests per ho0r so you can see this service is very much needed.

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