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Scam Calls
Repeated early-morning VISA scam calls from boiler rooms in India.
This morning, I pushed the botton and spoke with "Sam". I gave him my usual advice about his pencil and what to do with it.
One ...
You will need to see if your provider offers a similar service to Telus' Call Control. If they don't then you'll have to make a choice. The scammers are calling from overseas using spoofed numbers. And yes the scammers do spoof caller ID so that they display numbers that actually exist but have no connection to them. Call blocking on your phone is useless if they simply change numbers and get through again.
A lot of scammers use VoIP services like TextNow that will give them a Canadian phone number and the ability to receive calls on it as well. Phone numbers are portable / transferrable these days so a number that was associated with one carrier can easily be changed to another. Telus very well may not even own the phone number any longer, if they ever did. YellowPages isn't an accurate resource in determining the ownership of a phone number. datacorelookup is also not accurate in the majority of phone numbers I tried looking up. They had the provider wrong in so many cases and in almost all cases they had the usage type wrong as well. I know a number of people using Shaw, Rogers or Bell for phone service and the websites all list those numbers as Telus. Neither website even indicates where they are getting the provider information from or how recently they got it.
Number are spoofed constantly, VOIP numbers make it even easier to grab a pool of numbers (you've never needed "verification" just a name, email address, mailing address and payment info). I can think of 10 VOIP providers just off the top of my head.
Phone scams have been going on for decades, it's the consumer that has to educate themselves. Telcos try their best to keep up in the game of wack a mole. Most scams are overseas where police prosecution is next to nil, and falls solely on our government working with other countries to prosecute these people.
Um ... omg. I really really made it really really clear that this number IS NOT spoofed. When you can dial a number and get an answer from the same caller, that number is not spoofed. I've had my number spoofed and got the confused call-back to show for it. I've also called back a spoofed number and given the poor owner of the number a piece of my mind -- back in the days before we were aware of number-spoofing. I called this number back and got the scammer. G'head. Try it. Let me know whether the person who answers is Sean, Sam or Eric. (There are a surprising number of "Seans" in India, I've found.) I really really dislike being treated like a fool who needs lecturing, whether it's about how things work or about how I should do things. I am very aware of the fact that the Canadian government and the home governments of the criminals are doing nothing to stop this phenomenon. I am not at all persuaded that telecoms have no way of detecting and/or preventing the use of their services for criminal purposes. And you have certainly not persuaded me of that.
