M13KYF Posted November 2, 2006 Share Posted November 2, 2006 don't know if this is genuine or not but better safe than sorry > Can you circulate this around especially as Christmas is fast approaching. > It has been confirmed by Royal Mail. > > The Trading Standards Office are making people aware of the following > scam:- > A card is posted through your door from a company called PDS (Parcel > Delivery Service) suggesting that they were unable to deliver a parcel and > that you need to contact them on 0306 6611911 (a premium rate number). > DO NOT call this number, as this is a mail scam originating from Belize > . > If you call the number and you start to hear a recorded message you will > already have been billed £15 for the phone call. > If you do receive a card with these details then please contact Royal > Mail > Fraud on 02072396655 or ICSTIS (the premium rate service regulator) at:- > www.icstis.org.uk > or your local trading standards office. This is a genuine sca m and is > under investigation by ICSTIS. > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sl114 Posted November 2, 2006 Share Posted November 2, 2006 This is a scam email, BT state that it is not possible to charge someone anything over a certain amount per minute and these connection charges for £15 are not genuine as it is not possible. I think the maximum is set at £1.50 per minute and the same for connectiong. I will try to find the proper page that gives all the information on these scam junk emails Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M13KYF Posted November 2, 2006 Author Share Posted November 2, 2006 nice one. Did think that myself about premium rate telephone lines. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted November 2, 2006 Share Posted November 2, 2006 One of the blokes at work has done some research on this one, here's his email.... === Interestingly, this one’s half-true. (This one smelled like a hoax to me, so I did some digging...) The premium rate service regulator posted about this very issue: http://www.icstis.org.uk/pdfs_news/email.pdf So from the sounds of things, the description of the scam is not quite right and is also out of date. It was under investigation last year, and was shut down last December. It would have been helpful for the email to refer to this URL since the press release is right there on the web! But that would also have highlighted the inaccuracies in the email... Of course, it’s entirely possible that another outfit might try the same scam this year... So it’s useful to be aware of the potential for a scam, and to know how to recognize a number that might be scamful. The short guide is: be wary of numbers beginning with 09 and also those beginning with 070. (070 numbers are easily misrecognized – they look like mobile numbers, which also begin with 07. But they’re not.) Here’s the more extensive guide: Premium rate numbers begin with 09. So those are the ones to be most suspicious of. (Although as the ICSTIS press release says, you would need to be on for 10 minutes for even the most expensive premium rate lines to code you £15. It’s simply not possible to be charged £15 for making one short call.) It’s not all that easy to predict the cost of a call from the phone number. I had to do a bit of research to work out whether that number in the email was even likely to be real, let alone what it might cost to call it. The number in the email looks like it might be made up. Between April 1995 and July 2006, there were no UK numbers beginning with 03. (April 1995 was when PhONE day happened – remember that? The ‘1’ got added to most area codes, and a few other things got moved around. Then in 2000, various areas, including London, got moved into the 02 range. But 03 was still not in use at this point.) 03 had been reserved for future expansion, but apparently has now been repurposed for non-geographic numbers, which have previously all begun with 08. While 08 numbers vary in price (0800 numbers are free, 0845 costs the same as a local call, others always have a national call rate) 03 numbers will all be charged at the national rate - http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/news/2006/07/nr_20060727 so even if that is a real number in the email, it’s definitely not a premium rate one. You’d need to be on for 2.5 hours for it to cost £15, and even then, the party receiving the call would not get any money: Ofcom have declared that the 03 range does not permit revenue sharing. Note that 07 numbers can also be expensive. They’re not technically premium rate, but there’s no regulated cap on the prices. The industry currently self-regulates on these numbers, although apparently Oftel want to stop that. (These are mostly mobile numbers. But ones beginning 070 are not, and can be more expensive.) For the full gory details, see http://www.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/ioi/numbers/ and http://www.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/ioi/numbers/100806.pdf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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