The pandemic is getting more serious, and scammers are calling home phones and sending text messages to mobile phones, which contain misinformation or could leave you out of pocket if you fall victim. In the UK, we have seen more and more reports regarding to the coronavirus scam according to Ofcom, and therefore would like to remind you again about this topic.
We are all worried by the pandemic, and watching news reporting how the numbers increase and people’s panic buying really don’t help. Nonetheless, during this time and days, tellows would like to remind you do not fall victim of phone scams related to COVID-19. Scammers around the world are taking advantage of the fear surrounding it to deceive people into disclosing personal information and money.
So it’s July, the start of summer holidays of 2019. We are all planning our vacation ahead, personally the tellows team really wants to visit Portugal, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina… We only hope the holiday could be longer! Anyway, tellows hopes that besides enjoying your holiday, you don’t fall victim to a vacation phone scam! Let’s check out the following Vacation phone scam together.
Updated 24 Feb 2020
It is almost March, how time flies! The tellows team has also been busy keeping the information about phone scams up to date. As expected, unfortunately, the number of spam calls, especially related to cost traps, is soaring because of more advanced technology nowadays and scammers having more means to escape from the authorities. Scammers have been taking advantage of taxpayers in last year. According to HMRC, over 100,000 reports of frauds were reported last year and the number is increasing. Last year, HMRC announced that it has been working with Ofcom, Mobile UK, Mobile Ecosystem Forum and Telecommunications UK Fraud Forum together to prevent bogus tax calls. The cooperation was successful and 1050 numbers have been deleted by HMRC, of which many numbers started with 0300. HMRC also stated that the number of phone scam reports has reduced by 25%, which is a very promising sign.
The movie ‘You’ve got a mail‘ is one of the tellows’ team favorite movies. But my readers, how many of us can become Joe and Kathleen in real life? Unfortunately, more people are falling victims to ‘romance scams’ regardless of gender, according to the official information* of many countries. Let us have a look at the figure:
*Information from ACCC, FTC, Action Fraud, RCMP and Netsafe.
The numbers above are surprisingly alarming. In the US, the losses of romance scams rose from $33M to $143M in 2015 to 2018 as stated in FTC. Online dating becomes more popular and common nowadays, thanks to the technology we can meet endless potential romantic partners online. However, we also become more vulnerable when there are scammers try to take advantages of the online dating platforms.
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Dear readers,
This time tellows would like to share some insights about the impact of the Brexit on phone scams and unwanted calls. As we are all concerned, the Brexit is not only a frustrating process, but besides its own complexity and influences, there is also a very annoying side effect – the Brexit scams. Phone frauds are not strange to us, there are many fraudsters in the UK and we often read news about phone scams. However, Brexit is making it worse by providing these scammers more ways to deceive people. Let’s take a look at the latest four Brexit phone scams.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez and Kevin Grieve on Unsplash
Getting to know the Brexit scams
HMRC Brexit scams
Do you own a business and trade with the EU? If yes, then lets assume you have been told by the government that you have to register for a ‘UK trader number’. Scammers will try to reach you through email, text message or over the phone, and ask for your personal details such as bank account details, internet banking password or offering you a tax refund in exchange for personal or financial details.
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Dear tellows friends,
Have you ever wondered which country actually has more comments than your current country? Or how many comments are written on average in your country?
To answer these questions, we conducted a study on how many comments are written on tellows in individual countries regarding the page views and we discovered some interesting facts from the study.
tellows is currently available in 50 countries. For the study, we concentrated on the 17 most important tellows countries.
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Let´s go trough the most searched numbers!
New Sky: BT asking to add the telephone number of the New Sky business to add to the BT directory free of charge.
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Every number that you find in our community is classified according to the type of call. Through different types of call, our users can easily recognize to which category the number belongs to. But sometimes the different call types might be confusing. You might sometimes be wondering whether a certain number should be categorized “Telemarketer” or as “Aggressive Advertising”. To avoid any kind of confusion and to show the clear differences between the caller types, we would like to give an overview of every single caller type that we have at tellows. But we won’t just explain what the term means, we will also give you some tips if you perhaps receive these types of call. Continue reading
Dear tellows fellows,
lately we have been seeing many reports in our tellows community regarding fraudsters claiming to be computer tech support. These fraudsters used the most classic trick: they claimed to be from a well-known company such as Microsoft and told us that our computer had been infected or hacked. In order to fix the computer problem and prevent the virus from damaging the computer any further, they offered “assistance”. If we had agreed to this, they would give us some instructions we must follow. Usually, we would be asked to visit certain websites and enter our personal data there. Some fraudsters could even hack the computer and show a pop-up window to ensure us that our computer had indeed been infected by some viruses. In the end, they would either try to steal our personal bank data through the access we gave or charge us for the costs of fixing the non-existent computer issue. Continue reading
