Suffolk vicar felt ‘really stupid’ after phone scam

Being sent a shiny new phone in the post that you were not expecting may sound great, but it could well be a sign you have just been scammed.

Criminals might have got into your account, added a new handset to your bill, before asking you to “return” it – to their address.

Nearly 30,000 cases like this were recorded last year of what a telecommunications boss described as “at scale, organised crime”.

The Reverend Jenny Seggar, rector of the Two Rivers Benefice near Ipswich, fell victim to this type of fraud last year and told the BBC’s Scam Secrets podcast how the “very plausible” technique unfolded.

She first received a call from someone claiming to be from Tesco Mobile who said her Sim card needed to be replaced.

The woman on the phone also mentioned there was a special offer for a new iPhone and an Apple Watch, but Seggar said she only wanted the Sim card.

So when the package arrived with no Sim cards and instead with a new iPhone and Apple Watch, she “was not happy”.

Seggar called back to complain, the woman apologised and said there had been a mix-up.

Crucially she then asked Seggar to return the items, using a QR code she had provided.

Convinced she was sending the tech back to Tesco Mobile, Seggar took the QR code to the Post Office and sent it off, only realising afterwards something was wrong.

When Seggar contacted Tesco Mobile, staff told her the QR code led to a private address – meaning the fraudsters had bagged themselves a brand new iPhone and Apple Watch.

“I got back into the car and I thought, ‘Oh, I think I’ve just been really stupid. I don’t like how this feels’,” Seggaar added.

Tesco Mobile told Scam Secrets it was sorry about what had happened and that it would never cold call its customers.

More stories from Suffolk:

Seggar’s experience is part of a pattern of increasingly sophisticated scam activity across the telecommunications industry.

Cifas, which calls itself the UK’s leading fraud prevention service, says more than 29,000 cases of “mobile dealer fraud” like this were recorded to its national fraud database last year.

Murray Mackenzie, director of Fraud Prevention at Virgin Media O2, said customers who are affected are generally refunded, but it meant millions of pounds of tech was lost each year.

He said criminals gained access to people’s accounts during the initial phone call in a range of ways.

Sometimes they will use information from a data breach to convince them they are genuine, other times they will guess which network someone is on to win their trust, perhaps enough to convince them to read out a two factor authentication code.

Criminals will even set up their own accounts to learn how companies interact with customers so they can make their approaches even more convincing, Mackenzie said.

“If you’re in any doubt about who you’re speaking to, hang up the phone and call back whichever organisation it is, on a trusted number,” he advised.

“Any legitimate colleague in a legitimate organisation will never say, ‘I’m the only person that can help you’.”