atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Call Center Based Attack

I do not know the proper terminology so bear with me. I have this issue at a few of our facilities. This guy will call looking for an employee and will not leave a number. While he is still on the phone he is calling in again. Eventually it is to the point that this plant cannot make or receive any outside calls. I have tried calling the Phone Company on one instance that we got the phone number I called his provider and they said there was nothing they could do. I called the FBI and the local police. The police finally called the number and talked to them. Eventually they get tired and quit. These calls will start around 8 am cst and end around 11 am cst. This all stems from an employee filling out an on line credit application. The people from the call center in India are only trying to extort money. They even tried to get the Chief of Police to buy a picnic package from them and they would quit calling. Does anyone have a solution?

Call your carrier and report it as a nusance call and see if you can block that number.

Unfortunately, I tried calling our carrier. Unfortunately that option is not available to us in our area. I called their carrier and I was told they could not do anything without a court order. These lines currently do not have Caller ID. Of course the caller can spoof that anyway. You would think there would be a law. Is there a way to get the number without caller ID or does that take a court order also?

jab1780 actually that was the best advice. This was a different site and different carrier. AT&T was able to help and so far has been able to stop it. It is called the PayDay Loan Scam. It is causing such a problem that the Division of Homeland Security is supposed to be getting invloved. They also gave us two websites to report this. One was the Federal Trade Commission ftc.gov and the other was the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center ic3.gov. Thank you again!

Just curious of what type's of business are they hitting? Or is it strictly based on that credit card application.

We had the same problem on and off for about a month last year. Spoofed cid so we just put them on hold till they stopped calling. It was a pain and we saw up to 3 calls come in at a time one day. I have allways wanted to set up a voice mail with neverending transfers for people like that.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/news_blog/twist-in-payday-loan-phone-scams-affects-emergency-services

-Hal

It's not just businesses getting hit. If a day goes by that I don't get a strange number calling, it's a good day. Most days I recieve at least 3 calls and who knows how many texts I get from these payday loan people.

Why me, I don't know. I have never applied for a payday loan and the day this started happening, I made sure to pull my credit report and it showed nothing.

Because there is profit in numbers. I doubt any of us would understand why anyone would be interested in any of the garbage spam that arrives in our in-boxes yet there must be some because the spammers keep at it. These guys take it to the next level with extortion and ransom. Be annoying enough to enough people and some will give in to your demands just to make you go away.

Ever get hit with the "FBI green dot moneypack ransomware virus" where criminals lock up your computer under the guise of an FBI or Department of Justice sting for child porn or copyrighted material? I did just by Googling car parts. You are instructed to go out and buy a Green dot moneypack cash card at your local store, load it with $300 then enter the number in the box they have on your monitor and hit enter. They are supposed to unlock your computer but I understand you are screwed.

User to be this kind of stuff was just annoying but now nobody does anything without there being money in it.

-Hal

I heard once that the actual response rate to spam ads is as high as 1 percent. Doesn't sound like much, but it is huge when you consider that it is 1 percent of almost everybody...

Welcome to the "Brave New World" of telecommunications, where you have to be very brave to stay connected. This crap is only going to get worse, because the "authorities" either can't or won't do anything about it. Take caller ID spoofing for example. Maybe I don't understand something here, but I thought that doing that crap using VoIP still required a connection somewhere to a PSTN gateway with an SS7 connection. Isn't using a licensed SS7 connection for fraud grounds for revoking the license? What am I missing here?

Then there is the global craphole known as the web. I kept getting bogus emails that claimed to be from my ISP, telling me there was a problem with my account, and that I needed to go to such-and-such a place and enter my username and password right away or my service would be suspended. I did some digging, and traced it back to a company right here in the USA. This "company" has over 50 web addresses registered with godaddy alone, and in fact the one that was used on me had recently had its registration renewed! I couldn't believe this crap - a search of security sites showed that ALL of these godaddy addresses were being used for fraud, but apparently godaddy just doesn't give a shit, as long as they get paid.

I dug even deeper, and came up with the name of the douche nozzle who owned the "company." I also know his wife's name, their home address, his business partners name, and other things. I wonder how well they would sleep at night if they knew how much I knew about them...

Jim
==================================================
Speaking from a secure undisclosed location.