"Amazon Prime" new phone scam

This one hasn’t reached Scamwatch as of today. You get a recorded phone message saying your Amazon Prime account will be charged an amount ($39-95 in my case) and you should hang on for an operator. The operator has all the telling signs, noisy echoic background, heavy accent, sing-song script. It’s a scam boiler room somewhere in the India or perhaps The Philippines.

The one I spoke to was clueless and couldn’t get started on her spiel properly, I must admit I can be distracting on the phone in these cases as I am apt to say disconnected and puzzling things. $$$ I think she expected me to admit that I have a Amazon Prime account and to complain about being charged for no service. She hung up in a fluster.

Overseas accounts of this scam identify it as a new phishing expedition. They want you to give them personal and/or bank details.

Regardless of whether you do or do not have an Amazon Prime account the solution is the same as always, do not tell a stranger on the phone any personal details about yourself and above all never, ever tell them anything about your bank accounts.


$$$ More than usual that is.

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You will be lucky if it ever appears on Scamwatch, which is an absolute joke which the useless ACCC uses as window dressing as an excuse for doing nothing as usual.

They virtually ignored the “Andrew Forrest, etc, etc etc, etc Bitcoin Scams”, presumably as it was either too hard or it would help boost their next report as to how much Aussies had been scammed for so they can say “We told you so”.

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My favourite scam call of this type had the clear sounds of children playing noisily in the background. Call centres just aren’t what they used to be.

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Some workplaces now do allow Children to be with or near their parent/s. Examples of action being taken to allow this:

" In 2005, Carla Moquin, PIWI’s founder, read an article about Schools Financial Credit Union’s program allowing their employees to bring their young babies to work every day until they were around six months old and care for them in their work spaces. Even their tellers were able to bring their babies to work. Having had to return to full-time employment when each of her daughters was less than five weeks old, Ms. Moquin was intrigued by this idea.

After extensive Googling over the next few weeks, she discovered six other companies with baby programs, all of whom had created their programs from scratch and had believed they were the only company with such a program. Despite this, the parameters for these successful programs turned out to be surprisingly similar, and the business benefits were consistent across all the companies. Management at these companies loved talking about the transformation they had seen from allowing babies at work.

By 2007, Ms. Moquin was able to locate 70 companies around the United States with babies-at-work programs. She founded PIWI in December of 2007 to create a central resource for companies to access best practices and easy-to-use guidelines for starting a program, in the hope of ultimately encouraging thousands of companies to start programs.

PIWI is currently aware of more than 200 companies with successful programs in more than 30 different industries. These organizations have hosted more than 2,100 babies to date and have reaped extensive benefits for their businesses and their employees from their baby programs."

&

https://news.yahoo.com/kids-in-the-office-delight-or-distraction-180723036.html

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These children sounded like they were playing football in the street just outside the open window next to the operator. Not like any ‘Telstra’ office I can imagine in Australia.

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Heheh at the moment at least :slight_smile: Who knows what the future will bring us or Telstra? :smile:

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