If you do answer, and they start asking questions, just hang up. If your insurance is overdue, you should know it. If you don't, your insurance should be sending you a renewal. In the Post.
Lots of telephone scam threads but this is as good as any.
A quick-witted taxi driver enabled scammers to be caught and arrested as he telephoned Police when he was asked to drive an old lady to the bank where she withdrew several thousand francs:
Telephone fraudsters are currently active again. On Tuesday afternoon, October 1, 2024, and on Thursday morning, October 3, 2024, the Zurich city police arrested several suspected fraudsters. They had put pensioners under pressure with a false story and demanded several thousand francs from them.
On Tuesday afternoon, shortly after 12 noon, a taxi driver reacted correctly and reported to the Zurich City Police Operations Center. He reported that he had just driven an elderly lady to a bank where she had withdrawn a large sum of cash.
Because he assumed it was a grandparent scam, he dialed 117. Investigators from the Zurich city police immediately took over the case. A short time later, they observed a man who met with the woman and left the place with an envelope.
The investigators decided to check the man, a 62-year-old Romanian, and seized suspected stolen goods worth several thousand Swiss francs.
German and Afghan fraudsters were also arrested.
Full story, in German, here
There’s a good BBC radio series on scams.
This one, where people have had their bank accounts cleared out relies on people leaving their cards with their mobile phone - commonly in a bag at the gym.
Basically, using the card information, the thief steals the bag containing phone and card, installs a bank app on a separate phone and to get this authenticated, the bank will send them a code to their existing phone.
The thief can see this code as most people allow notifications to appear on a locked phone screen (I did before listening to this).
They then usually have a two hour window to go shopping for expensive goods they can sell on quickly (they buy another phone first).
Interesting point about phone notifications - I just turned mine off now as well, as in, it won’t display on the lock screen.
I set it to “Don’t show notifications at all”, but I noticed there was a middle option, “hide sensitive content”. I wonder if that would be sufficient? I mean, would it automatically recognise a verification code and hide it?
Also, beware you probably do not want a third pillar with an insurance company, it’s legal but it’s a trap.
Mine will let me chose app by app which notifications I want to turn off.
I got a scam email today:
I’m sure most users on the forum are pretty savvy but if you get an email such as this, always check the senders email address.
The tried they on me too but I cottoned on pretty swiftly since I don’t actually have a Netflix account.
A spot check of the English should be the first clue.”whith”
You don’t even need to check the email’s URL. This text is such a grammatical and stylistic disaster that I wonder if it was intentionally written to mock the caliber of Netflix employees. It seems like someone has a beef with them. It’s as if Netflix decided their hiring criteria for acct managers was: ‘must have dropped out of high school with a D- GPA as the pinnacle of your high school achievement’.
Maybe these scammers need to attend a community college writing course before their next attempt.
A few days ago, I received an SMS from a number abroad, which in good german was saying that the package that I was supposed to receive on that day could not be delivered due to an incomplete address. There was also a link, which was redirecting to a form with all the nice Swisspost graphics and could also lead to my personal Swisspost account (I guess I was already logged in on Swisspost) with information about the package.
I was indeed expecting a package on that morning from Galaxus, delivered by swisspost. The message was clearly stating the correct delivery date which was very surprising, so I decided to play along, but being cautious. I clicked on the link and the first page was asking for some info (name, address, telephone number, the usual stuff), which I filled in. In the second page, they were asking for a credit card to charge CHF 0.27 as re-delivery fees, so I stopped there, I also called Swisspost to confirm.
However, what is really puzzling is that they knew my number and they knew that I was expecting a package on that same morning. The message could have been sent to me any other day, however it was sent on the exact date that I was supposed to receive the package. If they have somehow access to either Galaxus and/or swisspost, this is a serious safety issue…
I read somewhere that including a spelling mistake is done on purpose in scams as those people who don’t spot it are likely to be more easy to scam and so their email address is added to a ‘special’ list.
I didn’t spot it as I didn’t read the mail - I first looked at the email address of the sender and stopped there.
@DarkOrion this was exactly my experience, and surprisingly it happened only once a few months ago if not a year ago, can’t remember exactly
I clicked on the link, but stopped on the page which asked for personal details as luckily I was distracted by German language. It surprised me that the language change was missing in it’s usual place on the top… which immediately woke me up. I’ve logged in to swisspost on my laptop and saw package delivered status, so I went downstairs and viola collected my package from my letter box.
I wonder, perhaps they flagged my number as “immune to this scam” 