36% of UK People Have Been Called by Scammers Impersonating BT

A new survey of nearly 4,000 UK residents has found that 36.41% of respondents had at some point received a call on their home phone line from someone they suspected, or knew for certain, was a scammer impersonating a representative of broadband ISP BT. One victim was even conned out of £34,000 from their bank.

The survey, which was conducted by Comparitech, similarly noted that there has been a significant annual increase in Google traffic for people searching the term “BT scam“. This is despite the fact that many phone providers, including BT, now implement strict nuisance call blocking features. However such features are often better at preventing spam calls than crafty fraudsters, even though they do catch some in the latter category too.

Sadly scam calls like this are nothing new and they can be targeted at a variety of different providers, although BT tends to be in the firing line more than most because they’re the largest ISP and the fraudsters are thus more likely to hit upon somebody who is actually one of their customers (hence why a lot of non-BT customers also receive fake calls claiming to be from BT support etc.). Nevertheless we’ve also seen plenty of scam calls from people claiming to be support staff for TalkTalk, Sky Broadband, KCOM and even some smaller providers.

In many cases the fraudsters will appear to be calling from a UK area code and some may even demonstrate knowledge of your personal details (e.g. name and address). However such details can often be scraped from public sources or bins and not to mention the huge amount of personal info. that has, in recent years, been stolen through unrelated hacks of different websites. In other cases we’ve seen situations where foreign call centre staff may have leaked details to criminals (e.g. TalkTalk’s past case).

Scammers then tend to use a variety of different tactics, such as claiming they’ve refunded too much money into your bank account (i.e. a way of extracting your bank details or getting you to send them money). In other cases they may panic you into thinking there’s a virus on your computer or problem with your broadband connection (i.e. the goal being to get you to install a remote desktop client or malicious software on your computer, which hijacks it).

In some cases the scammers will try to contact an individual multiple times and they’ll soon switch or spoof different numbers when blocked. Naturally most such calls come from outside of the United Kingdom, which makes them hard to tackle. Such criminals tend to like using countries with low labour costs and lax policing.

In reality most broadband and phone providers will never call up to ask subscribers for personal information, passwords or bank details out of the blue. Likewise they won’t ask for remote access to your computer, threaten to disconnect you and will always call from a known support number. If you have such a call then the best course of action is to put the phone down, wait a few minutes and then call your provider directly on an official number in order to report the incident.

BT has setup a dedicated page for reporting scam calls, which also contains additional advice. Just remember, even if the caller seems to know your account details, it’s still wise to put the phone down and then wait a couple of minutes before calling a known number for your provider to check. Likewise the same goes for emails, never assume that they’re authentic just because they look like a proper message (aka – phishing).

Sadly pensioners and other vulnerable groups are much more susceptible to such tricks, so do please help to educate your family members about the dangers. In the UK, some 50% of all phone calls are said to be spam, according to Truecaller, and 18% of all spam calls are scams.

Alternatively you can report such calls to Action Fraud via their website www.actionfraud.police.uk or by phoning 0300 123 2040, or call police on the non-emergency number 101.