Forum Discussion
Why is Telus selling services to international criminals?
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 automated message today gave a number for call-backs: 519-398-1988.
I called it from a different number. "Eric" answered, and I asked him whether "Sam" was comfortable.
I redialed that number and was informed that it is no longer in service.
I dialed that number from the number I had received the initial call on. It rang.
I am now receiving repeated calls from the boiler room, like a hive of angry bees I have poked. This happens from time to time. (I cannot afford not to answer calls, even from unknown numbers; I work freelance and I have very sick family members in other area codes.)
Information online says this number belongs to Telus:
https://www.datacorelookup.com/Phone/519-398-1988
Visa scammers and their illk are not just annoyances. They are big-time international organized crime, earning huge amounts of money for criminals.
What is Telus doing to stop its services being used for this purpose?
Does Telus have no safeguards in place to identify abuse of its services?
In the past, I have identified numbers being used for the CRA scam and traced them to a smaller Ontario service provider.
I ask Telus the same question I asked them (yes, I have emailed abuse @):
Your subscribers are using these numbers for extremely high volumes of calls, and switching numbers every few days. Why are there no mechanisms in place to detect and deter these criminals?
If anybody here can tell me, you are welcome to do so!
22 Replies
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You should try "Call Control", with Telus. I like it very much, as you can control who gets thru to you or not, by number.
- (a) Yes. I'm not with Telus, and do not have that feature at present. (b) I do have call blocking on my cell phone. These particular criminals (VISA fraud fraud) tend to use different numbers for every call. Yesterday's to my land line came from 647 and 519. Today's to my cell phone came from 226.
- Nighthawk
Community Power User
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.
Consider turning on the Call Control feature. I've received zero robo calls since I turned it on.
I'n not sure how any carrier can be assured that a new account isn't going to be used for conducting criminal activity. The best that can be done is to respond to reports after the fact. Did you report it to Telus?
https://www.telus.com/en/about/security/report-a-problem
Heh. Like I said ... I'm with Rogers. No pay-extra features. Actually planning to cancel Rogers this week because I have a "Zoomer" phone for 1/3 the price. It will have features. I'll cross my fingers.
On the main point, I don't doubt at all that telecoms could have mechanisms for detecting abuse. The firearms registry can flag suspicious multiple purposes, so surely...
I do think that simply verifying subscribers' identity and location might be a start!
I did say I had contacted Telus via abuse @ -- i.e. [email protected]. If I receive a reply, I will report it here.
Thanks!
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.
Oops, I can't edit. Just to head off the inevitable (it took me multiple exchanges to get the other provider in question to see the light re the CRA scam calls), I want to emphasize:
The number in question IS NOT being spoofed.
I dialed that number and the call was answered by the same criminals as the ones that called me with the automated VISA scam message five minutes before.
