CONSUMER associations have raised the alarm about fresh attempts to defraud members of the public by telephone and have issued information to help prevent people from falling into con-artists' traps.
Bogus gas and electricity inspectors arranging 'appointments' by telephone with homeowners – frequently the elderly or people they believe to be foreign – to carry out unlawful and unsolicited 'checks' on installations and then charge hundreds or even thousands of euros are gradually overtaking door-to-door on-spec visits.
And the 'missed call' trick is becoming rife in Spain, too, say consumer groups.
Normally, the caller hangs up after a maximum of three rings, relying on the occupant's curiosity or courtesy leading him or her to redial and find out who it was.
Whether occupants ring back or manage to pick up before the phone goes dead, they will get an automated message saying they have a parcel to collect and that they should send a text message to a given number, with the word buzón ('mailbox') to arrange to receive it.
If occupants do this, they will receive an error message saying, 'the SMS could not be delivered to the recipient' – but in practice, they will have inadvertently subscribed to a premium-rate text-message service.
This will then 'spam' them with text messages and charge an astronomical fee for receiving them.
Other times, if the occupant picks up the phone before the rings stop, he or she will get a message purporting to be from the telephone company and will request personal details to send a new mobile handset to their house.
These suspect calls tend to come from a mobile number starting 662 991, or a landline number apparently from Madrid, beginning 91 125.
Consumer protection groups say these calls should never be answered or returned, and no personal details whatsoever should be give out to the caller.
Another way of getting phone users to subscribe to premium-rate SMS services involves sending a message to the chat service WhatsApp, which says: “I'm writing to you via 'wasap' [sic]. Tell me if you're getting my messages. Did you add me the other day?”
The number is said to be 25568, and users should not reply under any circumstances or they will automatically have let themselves in for receiving a flood of text adverts which cost them a considerable fee every time they are received.
An additional telephone scam detected – although the caller's numbers have not been identified yet – involves tricksters pretending to be calling from the security department at Visa.
The person on the line says Visa has detected an 'unusual transaction' on the customer's card and needs to carry out some security checks.
The card-holder will be asked a series of questions concerning personal data, including their address and card number.
Next, using the same line as legitimate companies do for over-the-phone card sales, the caller will say he or she needs to check the customer is in fact currently in possession of the card and ask for the three security digits on the back of it.
Sometimes they will even ask for the PIN number.
Consumer groups warn that if the customer gives these details, he or she will find considerable amounts of money immediately disappear from the account after having been spent by the fraudsters.
And these protection groups reveal that continuing cases of the now-famous and so-called 'Microsoft fraud' have been detected in Spain, where a stranger rings claiming the line-holder has a virus on his or her computer and gives instructions allowing said stranger to take control of the terminal.
The occupant is then told he or she needs to renew the computer's software licence, often at a cost of around 200 euros, and is asked to hand over bank details or credit card numbers and PINs.
If the would-be victim refuses to do so, the caller is able to block the hard drive or introduce dangerous malware and spyware.
Calls like these normally come from either a withheld number or from a country in Asia, and the caller speaks English with an Indian or Pakistani accent and pretends to be from Microsoft's head office in California.
They started out targeting victims in the USA and UK, but more and more have been seen in Spain, particularly affecting English-speaking expatriates.
