Telstra impersonators trying to scam you

Received a call from a " gentleman" purporting to be from Telstra . Obviously it was a call centre . He told me my internet was compromised . I told him it was ok . I repeatedly told him that to waste his time . He said they were going to cut my internet off for 3 months , where have I heard that before ?/

Anyway I will pass their number on . 0269875657

I received the call on my land line . They have been , other scammers , giving it a good work over recently . NBN coming soon .Will ditch landline . Never use it .

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Ive received the same sort of phone call, with the caller purporting to be from Telstra, my communications provider.
When the caller told me they would cut off my internet, I told them " Go ahead and do it, and make my day", knowing they were scammers. They hung up straight away.

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Way to go Brian , the direct approach is often the best .

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No prisoners! :wink:

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I’m getting regular calls now from “Telstra” trying to get me to upgrade to NBN “before it’s too late”.
They’re NOT from Telstra but they have all my details, which they say they got from Telstra because they are “resellers” for telstra.
I do not recall giving telstra any authority to release my information but, what’s a man to do? ACL, NCAT, Ombusman, Legal system :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

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Wander through all your T&C if you are a Telstra customer.

and look at ‘Direct Marketing’.

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Wander? More like, pack a lunch, put on your hiking boots and prepare yourself for an expedition :wink:
They do say they may share my details with their “trusted partners”
 I wonder what constitutes trust
 paying a licence fee perhaps?
I also like where they say “Your information helps us to properly manage the products and services we provide to you”. Shame they’ve never been able to properly manage the products and services they have provided
 must have been written by a lawyer (or a politician).

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I believe the definition of a ‘trusted partner’ in modern business is anyone that might send a dollar their way.

Just a drop in the bucket to the typical software license, and all are a sign of the times.

"The current iTunes Terms and Conditions are over 19,000 words, translating into fifty-six pages of fine print, longer than Macbeth. Not to be outdone, PayPal’s terms weigh in at 36,000 words, besting Hamlet by a wide margin. The demands of these prolix legal documents are jaw-dropping. Take Adobe’s Flash, a software platform installed on millions of computers each day. Assume the average user can read the 3,500-word Flash license in ten minutes—a generous assumption given the dense legalese in which it is written. If everyone who installed Flash in a single day read the license, it would require collectively over 1,500 years of human attention. That’s true every single day, for just one software product. Imagine what would happen if you tried to read every license you encountered. "

More likely a team of lawyers. :expressionless:

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I reckon they are written by code - in a similar way to “Scott Pakin’s automatic complaint-letter generator”

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This is a well known scam that has been going on for years in various guises. They may claim to be from “The Windows Department”, Telstra or other big companies to do with computers and telecommunications. Mostly they know nothing about you, their system dials numbers at random or from a phone book trying to get a human to answer.

Typically they seem to be from Philippine or Indian call centres. It may be tempting to pity them and to see them as the poor downtrodden who have little choice in the work they do. I don’t. They know they are lying and cheating people and keep doing it year after year so all civility and humanity is off from me.

They are after your personal details, which may lead to identity theft, or to get you to allow them to control your computer remotely for nefarious reasons, or both. Under no circumstances allow them to download or install anything on your computer.

Unless you want to play with them (and be foully abused when they twig) hang up quickly.

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A good one, and methinks it could have included an update of the venerable add-on CLOG with inlined footnotes to avoid an unintended clarity


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I now have a silent number, however it has not stopped them from still calling, just drives me mad!!

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The silent number takes some time to drop off their radar. For us it was about 18 months but the calls during that period dropped off rapidly after about 12 months.

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Get an answering machine! Allow all calls to go through the machine and never answer unless it is a call you recognize. These pests never leave messages. Warn your friends of you actions. I have been doing this for years now after receiving 20+ calls daily despite being on the no-call register. Score now is pests nil
me peace!__

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VoIP and Mobile - if the number doesn’t match a number in my personal address book, the phone doesn’t even ring - straight to voicemail.

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Thank you Grahroll, there appears to be light at the end of the tunnel then?

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I have an answering machine, however my family live in another state, and I get excited and think it will be them, as sometimes the pests come up at Private (the same as my family) and other times it is a very very long number that looks nothing like any telephone number I have seen or no-one answers when I say hello, that is creepy!!!

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They are ex-Telstra employees from call centres in India and use a different Sydney or Melbourne phone number everytime their number is reported and shut down. It makes it harder to trace them. They have been calling me on and off for 2 years and today they tried with the “Your Service will be cut for 3 months” fear call. One time I said I know your not from Telstra and I am hanging up then calling Telstra
they rang 23 more times everytime I hung up to try and stop me. I pulled the cord and rang Telstra the next day.I had a break for about 6 months after that.

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The silent number won’t stop them all as some of the call centres use number generators but our cold callers have dropped to about 1 per 2 months. The biggest thing to remember is never ever use your phone number in any competitions or surveys.

The link following is a post I made some time ago:

If you don’t have a mobile just buy yourself a cheap one at Coles or similar for using as per the instructions in the link above. It certainly doesn’t need to be a smartphone so should only cost $30 or so to get one.

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If you warn your folks (and all friends) and ask them to identify themselves when they call, you could perhaps avoid the ‘creepies’. Not the usual way to make a call but in this day and age we all have to be aware of people who are trying to relieve us of our money and/ or personal details. My number has been unlisted for quite a while but that has not stopped them. Pity they did not put their minds to doing something for others rather than trying to rip them off.

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