Last night I got a phone call from an institute for deaf and blind children (I don’t recall the name). The rep on the phone started by telling me about the cause and asked me if I’d be interested in buying some raffle tickets to be in the running to win a car; naturally the proceeds from the raffle go towards their cause. Sure, I was quite happy to buy some tickets so the rep asked me for my credit card details. Hmm.
I explained that I wasn’t willing to give out my credit card details to him as he had called me and not vice verca, so there was no way to verify that he was in fact from the institute that he declared to be from. He was a little puzzled and wasn’t sure what to do. In the end he said that he was able to mail me some material and that I could purchase the tickets by filling out a form and posting it back.
That’s the third time in the last few months that I’ve received a call that at some point during the conversation have been asked for sensitive information. The other two phone calls where from Telstra.
The first phone call from Telstra was in relation to an overdue bill - OK I usually pay my bills on time, I somehow missed one! The rep called me, told me he was from Telstra and started by asking for my date of birth “for security reasons”. I’ll admit that I was more suspicious of this call because he had a thick Indian accent, and I’ve watched too many documentaries about fraud from that region. I told him that I wasn’t comfortable with giving out that information (again, because he’d called me) but he sounded surprised, and actually seemed a little shirty. I asked him for a phone number that I could call back on, so he gave me a 1800 number. I jumped on the Telstra website to see if I could match the phone number, but couldn’t find a match anywhere. I tried the white pages with the same result.
The company that I work for has a contract with Telstra, so I asked our rep if she could help me out and verify whether this call sounded legit or not. She emailed me back and confirmed that yes, it was a legitimate phone number and that I should call back.
My point here is that this is extremely bad practice. Companies should not be calling their customers and expecting them to provide sensitive information. By doing so, they are supporting “cold call fraud” as I will call it. The documentaries that I referred to before (one was on the ABC, the other was a story on one of the current affairs shows) were reporting that this type of fraud is on the increase. The only way to prevent it is to encourage the general population to be wary of calls like this.
To draw a parallel, banks don’t email their customers and ask them to update their account details, and in response to recent phishing attempts, they have gone to considerable effort to educate their customers about these attacks. Companies like Telstra should be taking the same approach to their outbound phone calls and should develop a standard protocol for calling their customers where sensitive information needs to be exchanged, for example, asking them to call a 1800 number (one that’s actually listed) before providing their details.
If you’re still interested, the other call from Telstra was a from a rep who wanted to “help me reduce my Telstra bill”. He also started by asking for my date of birth to which I replied as before. The rep got very frustrated and clearly missed my point. He kept responding “but for security reasons I need your date of birth” to which I would reply “yes, but for security reasons I can’t give it to you… because I can’t be sure you are calling from Telstra”, to which he would reply “yes, I am calling from Telstra and I would like to help you save money” and so on and so on until I hung up.
Posted in 
