VANCOUVER – Telus has estimated that tens of thousands of consumers and businesses across Canada have recently received fraudulent automated phone calls informing them that they have won a prize.
The recorded announcement instructs the listener to press 9, 0, number sign to claim their prize.
Pressing 9, 0, # on many business switchboards will transfer the incoming call to an outbound line, allowing the fraudsters responsible for the automated calls to pick up the line and make expensive overseas long distance calls at the business’ expense.
Residential telephone lines are not vulnerable to this phone scam. This scam can only succeed if the recipient of the automated call is at a business or commercial switchboard, says Telus.
Telus is urging businesses with a switchboard to take some simple steps to protect themselves from this scam:
* Alert switchboard operators and reception staff to this latest phone scam.
* Implement a policy that restricts employees from pressing 9, 0, number sign, or 9, number sign based on requests from outside callers or recorded announcements.
* Program the switchboard to block overseas calling if the business does not require it.
Although fraudsters cannot assign charges to a residential telephone line from this scam, there have been reports of consumers following the prompts and being requested to enter credit card information to secure their prize. This can result in unauthorized charges to a credit card.
Consumers should never enter their credit card information when prompted to by an unknown caller or automated call.
This latest phone fraud is a variant of an old scam where the fraudster would manually call a business and try to persuade the switchboard operator to transfer the call to an outside phone line. The fraudsters would pretend to be telephone repair technicians testing the lines or distressed customers demanding to be transferred to local 0 or 011, which then transfers them to a long distance line or operator. This new variant uses an automated dialer, which randomly dials numbers in an attempt to connect with vulnerable businesses.
