Last night I got a call from a fraud alert type organisation who said there had been unusual activity on my account and I needed to verify details.

So far, so run of the mill. Usually they say “please tell me the number on the back of your card so I can confirm you have it…”

But on this occasion, he said “Don’t give me any details, what I want you to do is ring the number on the back of your bank card and give them this reference number and they will transfer you through to the fraud prevention service.”

Hmm, ok, sounds reasonable. So i call the number on my bank card and the guy asks a few security questions and then i tell him why I’ve called and he asks for the reference number. I give it to him and then he says he’s transferring me. <<annyoying hold music>> “hello, fraud prevention department, can I take your reference number please?”

Then, a few more security questions, I give him my date of birth, then he wants the long number on the bank card and for some reason I suddenly get suspicious. Partly, because the guy says “actually” a lot, which is an odd reason to be suspicious, but I was. I realised then that it was the same person that rang me first, pretending to be someone else and re-taking my name etc.

Anyway, I get cold feet and say I’m going to call back. Call back on my mobile, and get a completely different place. Speak to my bank – no problem on account.

Went outside this morning to examine the phone line and it has been cut and some extra wiring has been inserted, presumably transmitting the call to some guy around the corner in his car or something pretending to be the fraud hotline. Have a pic but not sure if it will work:

Virgin have been useless so far, but the police are interested and are coming round later to have a look. Quick google has shown at least one other person has found these things on their line, but virgin haven’t been able to confirm to me that they shouldn’t be there.

Anyone with virgin fancy going to have a look on their phone line? Don’t think i’m being paranoid but…

jon

Wow.

Your picture doesn’t work, but I got it from the source code.

On internal BT wiring, the orange pair is the ringer, and not used on a modern phone. The blue pair carry the voice signal; here, they’ve been cut and rejoined. The little orange doohickies are just mini scotchlocks for joining cable, there’s nothing insidious there.

As it stands now, I’d hazard that your phone line is fine. It begs the question though as to why it’s been cut and spliced like that. Assuming that this was an elaborate fraud ploy, they’ve possibly cut the cable to add whatever they needed, then removed it and patched the line back together when they were rumbled. Maybe.

I was thinking that my idea was a little over the top – but my out-going call to the bank definitely went straight to them, and when i dialled on my mobile it worked as normal. virgin wont help me sort it out, but i don’t want to look like a tinfoil-hatted moron when the police come round…

You’d see that sort of cable joint for all sorts of reasons

I can’t imaging crooks going to those lengths to repair a cable after tapping the line, they’d probably just twist them and run – where’s the junction box situated?

cables are at ground level in front of the house. it wasn’t like that when it was installed about 6 weeks ago.

When i was speaking to the “bank”, one of the other things that made me suspicious, was that he said i could dial the number on the back of any of my bank cards and they would put me through to the fraud place, so it didn’t matter what number i dialled.

Holy, and indeed, cow.

You should be able to see if a call went out via the official route on you phone bill

but i don’t want to look like a tinfoil-hatted moron when the police come round…

I did that once after a night on the piss, very embarrassing. 😳

Just a guess, but perhaps he didn’t hang up after the first call and so wasn’t disconnected at all, easy enough I would imagine to send dialing tones etc down line and then answer when you finish dialing – just an idea

Phone provider call-center scam? Don’t know if it’s even possible; but it’s somewhat logical.

EDIT

Just a guess, but perhaps he didn’t hang up after the first call and so wasn’t disconnected at all

…is more logical.

Have you got a wider shot of the cables – where do they go? If someone was going to hack into your phone line, then the best place to do it would be in the nearest junction box. If it has been tapped into (a specific offence in itself IIRC), then it could be they cut it at your house to put a tone on it to trace your pair in the nearest street level box, then jumper that onto another pair that they are connected to. Do you know where this box is and does it look like it’s been broken into?

If this has happened, it’s very elaborate.

He didn’t hang up the first time – and he may have a gadget that produces a fake dial tone.

Finally got somewhere with virgin. For unconnected reasons, there has been an outgoing call bar on our phone for the last week (wife made a long work call to USA and it triggered some sort of credit control system – we hardly ever use the phone so didn’t notice!) so we cannot make outgoing calls from our phone.

Either they were wired in to the line, or the above theory about not disconnecting is true – but not sure how that would work.

thanks for your thoughts so far

A phone call doesn’t disconnect unless you both hang up. So after the first call you hang up but he doesn’t, instead he plays a dial tone. You pick up the phone, hear a dial tone, dial the number, he waits for the beeping to stop, and answers pretending to be someone else.

hm, so there is a problem with outgoing calls – and yet you managed to (possibly) make a call.. would say it’s a hell of a coincidence for these two events to happen within a week, no?

so sounds like any outgoing call is going straight to this Virgin call centre after all, and it’s different ‘fraud’ centre to the bank’s ‘fraud’ centre.

weird.

No, he didn’t make an outgoing call – he got an incoming call, hung up, then picked up the phone and continued the incoming call.

Oh, and that phone connection looks perfectly normal – two wires connected, nothing else patched in – the orange things are just wire joints.

cables are at ground level in front of the house. it wasn’t like that when it was installed about 6 weeks ago.

I had a BT line installed at my last house. They left it looking a bit untidy, with clips missing on the soffits where they could have made it much neater. It wasn’t a big deal, so I got on with my life. Noticed a couple of weeks later that they had been back when I was out and tidied it up. It is possible that some work has been done ‘officially’ without you knowing.

Faking a disconnect, and relying on you thinking you had dialled back out seems more likely. Did you get put on hold at all, or get straight through? If you got straight through, can you remember the last time you phoned any bank number and didn’t go through at least one ‘press 1…’ system and stayed on hold for a while?

Scammers like this make money by ringing hundreds of people with the same scam, hoping to get lucky in a few percent of cases. I doubt they’d have the manpower to cut/reroute your phone line in person.

Dave

A phone call doesn’t disconnect unless you both hang up

I didnt believe that (sorry!) so I’ve just tested that out – and its true from one landline to another (BT 2 Virgin).

I suspect that’s whats happened: they reply on folk “phoning” back straight away (whilst they’re still on the line).

Well done for being so suspicious BTW.

I didnt believe that (sorry!) so I’ve just tested that out

I had a mis-spent youth – used to play phone hacking quite a bit, special engineer codes which let you make free calls, stuff like that 🙂

ok – maybe it’s a paranoid delusion. Quite clever, but not as advanced as I’d thought.

Doesn’t explain the cable bodge, but maybe it’s just a bodge.

A phone call doesn’t disconnect unless you both hang up

Not exactly. A phone call doesn’t disconnect unless the caller hangs up. The recipient can do what they like.

Interesting…

our virgin media phone line box thingy as been interfered with lately.. only we don’t use our landline really and rarely answer it as its usually autmated crap or PPI muppets.

We’re in Leeds BTW..

Doesn’t explain the cable bodge, but maybe it’s just a bodge.

It’s not a bodge though, it’s accepted practice

Apparently the staying on the line trick is big business.

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/fraud-warning-card-scam-nets-111508551.html