Scamwatch: NBN & Telstra Optus Technical Department Scams

The NBN are warning consumers about the NBN scam.

https://finance.nine.com.au/2019/03/25/08/12/nbn-scam-on-the-rise-as-internet-customers-duped-by-cyber-criminals

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The voice is automated - same as the ATO scam, same as the Telstra internet scam; etc etc. I am now wondering why I retain a home phone, as these scam calls and cold callers and charities are the only calls we get now. (cold callers also ignore the do not call register)

I had a recorded call today and was told to press 1 to be connected to tech. I hung up

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i retain my line for wifi

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: ‘Telstra Optus Technical Department’ on the Prowl

I received a robo call today, thought this mob had given up but not so. It went something like this:

Your internet service will be disconnected tomorrow because of payment problems.

Press 1 to pay now or 2 to have your internet disconnected.

I stayed on the line to see what would happen. A young lady with a strong Indian accent was obviously in a fairly large boiler room. I only got limited information about who they were - Telstra Optus Technical Department. I was not inclined to play further today. It would not be surprising if these ‘operators’ are just naive young people working for a scammer and think they are in legitimate call centres just doing a job; and some probably know they are doing a scam and don’t care since they probably get commissions. Maybe and maybe not. Not having caller-ID no number to report.

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Thanks for the warning :+1:

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They don’t give up. Today it was a mechanical robo-voice from the Australian National Broadband Network.

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I had the exact same robot call yesterday - and have had several over the past month or so. I tried to put in a complaint to the government scam body, but if the calls come from overseas, it seems nothing can be done. VERY annoying!

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Nothing is usually done when they are on-shore either :frowning:

Reports get posted on scamwatch and that is usually the end of it except when one becomes politically impossible to ignore. It is ‘being seen’ or the equivalent of a ‘photo op’ for government, not ‘doing’.

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that’s an expected disappointment. I’ll just hang up which goes against my politeness grain, but that is wearing a bit thin!!

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I get these several times a week nowadays. They always say they are some company’s technical department. I agree with TheBBG that nothing ever happens to address this, whether they are lodged from or beyond Australia. That’s something I’d really like to hear about from the Government in terms of prioritisation.

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It’ll never happen in this country, reports to the ACCC do nothing, reports to fair trading/consumer affairs do nothing, scamwatch and other similar sites do nothing. All they do is take a report which may or may not be included in some statistics they release once a year. We could be more proactive as well and actually shut many of these scams down fairly quickly but we do nothing.

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They don’t seem so naive when you challenge them about whether they’re part of a scam or not. We were getting these ‘Telstra’ robocalls every day for a few weeks, and one time my housemate got through to an operator who told him to ‘call our headquarters in Melbourne if you don’t believe me’ then hung up without another word.

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How? What is the technology that will filter out unwanted calls from overseas via VOIP? Do you know of something or are you just assuming that it exists?

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I’m wasn’t talking about shutting down VoIP calls but in general many of these scams could be shut down if the government was protective. But in the case of these scam VoIP calls identify patterns and deal with them.

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But how exactly? There are huge numbers of these calls coming in each day from overseas boiler rooms. How do you identify them? How do you prevent them from getting through? I have asked these questions before, so far nobody can tell me how. You are saying it is due to government inaction, it looks to me that it is due to lack of a technical solution.

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How exactly? It depends on the scam.

The government can freeze Australian bank accounts for example, they can put GPS trackers into parcels paid for with stolen funds to find the people behind these scams, they can identify the origin of VoIP calls and work with overseas authorities to shut them down, they can prosecute overseas scammers, they can shut down credit card facilities and all of this is doable today but we do none of the above in Australia.

For example other countries do things whereas Australia just collects reports.

Prosecutions both in the USA and India and they have laws coming in that will make prosecution faster and with harsher penalties.

The Australian government is happy to block access to sites that affects record and movie companies so why not do the same for overseas VoIP providers? Our ISPs are happy to block access to whole websites when they feel like playing censor so why not block these scam VoIP calls?

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How do they identify them and how do they prosecute them? Can you point to any case of this happening?

Assuming all this is possible and OS authorities eventually decide to act the boileroom will just pop up somewhere else in Mumbai, Manilla or wherever a few weeks later.

I would think given how widespread, costly and annoying the problem is there would be votes in taking action. If it is so easy what is your theory as to why our government fails to act?

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They arrest them and prosecute them through the courts. I just gave you an article with many arrests in the USA and India.

Using your logic we should ignore all crime! Once again read the article I linked to, they go after the top people and they are given sentences of around 20 years.

And as I said they could block all traffic from the scammers very quickly

There are no votes in taking action, only a small percentage of people are affected and Australia is utterly and totally useless in prosecuting any crimes like this and always has been. Look at the huge problems with scammers (Gumtree, eBay, driveway resurfacing and roof repairs to name a few) coming here on VISAS that the police do nothing to address, look at the ongoing issues that have been common since early 2000’s with credit card fraud and eBay. Has anything been done? Nope. Our police investigate very little crime and the criminals know that Australia is a soft target.

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