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Tell HN: audio of person who lost £15,000 to fake Microsoft calls

11 points| DanBC | 11 years ago | reply

The BBC Radio Four programme "You and Yours" had an interview today with a person who lost a lot of money to the fake Microsoft callers.

She gave them access to her computer; the showed her an error log and offered to fox those with a lifetime sub of just £250. She paid that. They called month and found more problems each time which required further payment to fix (even with her lifetime subscription) which she paid.

She eventually realised something was wrong and the police got involved.

The fraudsters then called her up claiming to be from law enforcement. They said they needed her to make a £600 payment so they could tell where the money was going to, so that the could then make arrests. Again, she paid repeated sums of money to those people.

The interview is very near the end of this 56 minute programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b045yg1w

So: how do we protect vulnerable people from fraud?

HN hears a lot about over zealous protection (Paypal holding funds; Google shutting accounts; credit cards blocking cards used abroad) but we don't tend to hear much from people losing a lot of money.

5 comments

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[+] petercooper|11 years ago|reply
Some sort of proper identification system for phone numbers (so that you get a browser-style "green" light when the source is "verified") or, at the risk of sounding harsh, ensure vulnerable people's phones only accept calls from whitelisted numbers (or at the very least, numbers that are geographically located and have a traceable location).
[+] _mulder_|11 years ago|reply
That could really work, especially as most frauds like this are performed using PAYG mobile SIMS, however, they're more likely to exploit it with a 'number unknown' similar to what we have today with Caller ID.

This could work really well, and be easy to implement, with a VoIP service too.

[+] mcintyre1994|11 years ago|reply
This could be a really neat idea. If they don't already, I wonder if Google would consider verifying business phone numbers optionally. Android's caller ID powered by that database is awesome but if they had verification they could potentially make a real difference here. It definitely seems backward that we apply more verification to a company's Twitter account than phone number.