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Scam calls - "Amazon"

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    Scam calls - "Amazon"

    Got two calls within an hour or two of each other this morning to my home landline, along the same lines as one or two I had some weeks ago - an automated message purporting to be from Amazon, thanking me for "renewing my Prime account" at some ludicrous alleged price and inviting me to press some number if I wanted to cancel. I'm guessing they do manage to snare some people because Amazon do push their Prime subscriptions heavily when you order stuff online and get to the delivery options (so it's a cunning choice of hook for a scam) and I've twice in the past subscribed for a free trial period and then had to take steps to cancel later (as I have close to zero interest in the various benefits of a Prime package, other than getting goods delivered which I order on their site).

    The clues to its being a scam include (a) why the hell would Amazon call me about this or indeed anything, (b) the implausibly stupid scary price and (c) the fact that I know I haven't actually subscribed for Prime since I last cancelled (with acknowledgement).

    I'm guessing the scam works, like many other "press X" type automated phone scams, by the "press X" button putting you through to a premium rate line (a slice of the fees for which gets passed on by your phone company to the scammers). I think I've heard before that that "works", and that punters have indeed been liable for premium rate phone calls when they've taken the bait. If I had the time or energy, and knew where to start looking, I'd want to find out how the hell that is treated as compatible with English consumer protection and/or contract law, given that you would be being charged a rate for a call to which you have not been alerted, much less consented. But I don't have the time or the consumer protection know-how, so I'll just try to keep refraining from pressing X.

    #2
    There's a particularly bad one that's developed recently since they started allowing 3rd parties to put things on people's phone bills. I got signed up to some scam game tips newsletter by doing the equivalent of bum dialling on an ad banner in my RSS reader. Deleted that particular feed as soon as I realised what happened and cancelled the recurring charge, which would have been enormous if I hadn't caught it. Ridiculously, you have to do it via the scammers, not your phone company. Luckily in this case the firm in question was just reputable enough to comply (though not reputable enough to follow the rules on confirmation).
    Last edited by Ginger Yellow; 30-07-2020, 12:25.

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      #3
      The other way any Press X scam works is by confirming the existence of a human willing to respond in the number in question, which increases the value of said number on the secondary market.

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        #4
        This is why you shouldn't answer the phone, of course.
        Last edited by DCI Harry Batt; 30-07-2020, 12:37.

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          #5
          I'd have gone with "Scamazon", myself.

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            #6
            My cell phone has started (well, quite a while ago now) putting up messages like "telemarketer" or he like instead of the actual damn number when I get calls. Now this might be OK if they didn't call numbers like, oh, my daughter's school "spam risk", and not give any information at all on what the actual number is. I can find out the number if I go to the recent calls, where it is still listed as "spam risk" and click on the tiny i, avoiding clicking on the much larger area that calls back the "scam risk" number that I don't know. It appears that the only way round this is to enter all the numbers who may ever call you legitimately into your contacts list.
            I'll not make any cynical comments as to which parts of this are deliberate acts by my phone company.

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              #7
              Which also brings to mind another of my pet peeves of somebody else pretending they're making your life easier but making it somewhat harder, which is the email quarantining software we're now using at work. Basically it decides that it's going to hold on to some of my emails, and every morning around 8 I get an email from it listing the emails that it's intercepted over the last 24 hours. So now I have to open this email, look through the list and decide if any of these i want to read, click on them individually which opens a website that tells me that it will forward me said email once it's good and ready. Whereas without this "helpful" piece of software I just deleted all the crap without opening it and got the acceptable stuff in a timely fashion, rather than a day later.
              No doubt somebody will be along to tell me that there's a good reason why junk email shouldn't be allowed to even make it as far as my inbox.

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                #8
                If I was running the scam detailed in the original post, as well as trying to keep you on hold for as long as possible to rack up the premium rate earnings, at some point I'd ask for your memorable name, and then use it as your email password (I'd have got your email address from the same person who sold me your phone number). It wouldn't work on most, but I reckon you'd get a couple of successes a day, and then you could start doing some proper scamming.

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                  #9
                  Another Amazon scam doing the rounds is where you get an email from "Amazon" saying that they had taken your last payment twice and that you have to verify your account to get the refund by pressing the verify button. The mail itself looks like it comes from Amazon - it's reasonably well worded and does have the logo, but the giveaway is the mail address it comes from. I can imagine that a fair number of people have fell for this one, as well as one doing the rounds from Paypal saying that your account limit has been reached and that, again, you need to press a verify button to continue.

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                    #10
                    Originally posted by S. aureus View Post
                    Which also brings to mind another of my pet peeves of somebody else pretending they're making your life easier but making it somewhat harder, which is the email quarantining software we're now using at work.
                    Ugh, yes, I very much subscribe to this complaint. Our email software now replaces all links in emails with some "safelinks" obscured bullshit link, so that all outgoing links run through some automated check whether the link is safe. I used to be able to see for myself whether the link was safe, by inspecting the URL. But now I can no longer read the fucking URL, so I cannot check this for myself anymore. The automated system must now fish out clicked unsafe links which I wouldn't follow in the first place if that software wouldn't be there. In turn, this makes the IT department think that the software is necessary.

                    I appreciate that the vast majority of users are not as neurotic careful as I am, so on an institutional level this makes sense. I just wish there was room for more than a "one size fits none" solution.

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                      #11
                      I've been bitching about that for a couple of years now.

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                        #12
                        On the topic of premium rate phone numbers, I remember reading, possibly on here, about a bloke who bought his own premium rate number, and used it when signing up for anything. Then when it was sold on to cold-calling companies, he would happily listen to them talking away about PPI or on accident that he'd been involved in that wasn't his fault, knowing he was getting ?1.50 a minute for the privilege.

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                          #13
                          I was pleased to get no less than two phone calls about my recent car accident this week. The old ones never go out of style.

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