Local phone numbers used in scam

Telemarketers with a too good to be true sales pitch designed to empty a person’s wallet for something that is not too good at all have found a new way to get people to fall for their tricks.

Daniel Williams, senior call-taker supervisor at the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, said vacation call centres in Florida have started using a new form of “Caller ID Spoofing” where the first six digits of a person’s phone number followed by four random numbers appear on the phone. He said this tricks people into believing they are receiving a local call offering them a once in a lifetime travel package to an exotic location for a small credit card payment, which makes the actual “lousy deal” easier to believe.

“A lot of consumers now are very hesitant about picking up any blocked or foreign looking numbers, (but) this call has nothing to do with the number that is showing up,” said Williams. “Sometimes the call display shows the name of the person who the phone belongs to and sometimes it doesn’t. The legitimate holder of that number, they’re not (the one) dialing. It’s simply a call display trick.

“Then there are different pitches that they’re using at the start and it’s usually automated and the most common one is, ‘you’ve won 260,000 Air Miles, if you wish to claim press one,’ and when you press one you get patched through to the vacation call centre in Florida.”

Williams said selling lousy vacation packages is not illegal and has been around for a while and will continue to be as long as people are willing to buy them. He said the deception is the way the telemarketers are getting their foot in the door.

“In the last year more and more of what we’re seeing is they’ve gone to this first six digits of your phone number and then a random last four,” he said, noting Caller ID Spoofing has actually been around since 2004 and used to just be a series of random numbers. “It’s very common now. Where it is really worth our while to document the information is the consumer who has bought the vacation package on their credit card and then feels they’ve been cheated because they went into this because of the connection with Air Miles.”

Terry Oxman, a resident of Davidson, said he received a call with the number 306-567-1731 Feb. 18 at around 2 p.m. stating that he had won a vacation or prize. He said initially he thought it was a “Davidson local thing” and only hung up on the person because it was a bad connection.

Oxman said he called the number right back and received a message from SaskTel saying this number is out of service. It was only then that he realized it was a scam.

“This is the first time I recall it being a local call,” he said. “I would hate to hear someone got stung by this thinking it was a Davidson number.”

To read more please see the March 3 print edition of The Davidson Leader.