I suppose you are all familiar with the one where they ring and tell you that your Internet account is going to be cancelled in the next 24 hours unless you press button 1 and wait for further instructions.

I don't know what button 1 does but my guess is that it puts you onto a premium-rated line where a very long recorded message will add a couple of hundred pounds to your telephone bill.

But just now I received a call which is a very clever variant of this scam. Instead of threatening me, it simply informed me that money would be withdrawn from my bank account as agreed to pay for my new Amazon service unless I pressed button 1 to cancel it. Needless to say, I don't take any services, paid or otherwise, from Amazon. But that surely is the point of the scam: people are going to think that they have been wrongly subscribed to something and that they must unsubscribe immediately or lose money.

There's one born every minute!

A variant of this that I've received is that my "Microsoft account" will expire: Press 1 to renew.

Got this on my voicemail the other day, actually. I just don't answer phone calls unless it pops up with a name I know, or I'm on-call and it's a local number.

I received the same call yesterday about Amazon taking payment from my account.

It'd be interesting to know which country the scammers are in. I'm in Australia.

My mother had a call 'from her ISP"advising she had not paid and would be cut off in a few weeks. Luckily, though shje may not be as tech-savvy and logical as Hazel, she's an intelligent and clued-up lady.

I got that call about a month ago, recently got call from social security about my account being hack to call some number to fix so I won't go to jail, it was something along those lines. I use to get calls about my laptop being hacked long before I ever owned a laptop

Huh - how's that something to be worried about. Gotta be viewed as a blessing ...

I get the "I'm from Microsoft" calls from time to time, but the Amazon is a new one for.

The "Press 1" won't connect you to a premium rate number, what happens is that the mass-dialer puts you in to an IVR script and when you press 1 it'll put you in a queue for the next available "agent" to "help" you.

The reasoning behind this is that only the gullible will press 1, so in effect it's pre-screening victims.

This is the same way that all the "dead relative" / "packaged delayed" / "lottery win" e-mails are so BADLY written. It's so that only people that are gullible enough to read such nonsense and think it applies to them will reply.

Yes, help you out of your hard earned money.

If you come across scammers, especially email scammers, don't report their emails to their ISPs.
Instead, go to scambaiting websites and give them the infos, they'll tie the scammers up as long as possible.
If you report them to the ISP then they'll just get a new email address, which takes no time at all.

Were they saying about Amazon Prime? I have several calls from them since few weeks ago, and I also read people reporting about these scams at social media for a while. I think it's a variation of those tech support scams, which have been around us for years, like what I have read at https://www.whycall.me/202-695-7690.html. People should know about this and keep informing their family about how these scammers work.

This is the latest rather "entertaining" email scam doing the rounds (I've censored to hopefully ensure it's within LQ rules...)

The latest scam here is a fake debt with the Tax Office I believe.

They even went to great lengths in at least one case, and dressed up a federal police - complete with an eftpos machine too.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-...chine/11603144

Cynwulf, that isn't entertaining, it's terrifying! Even if you knew you hadn't made any incriminating videos, you might still have good reason to believe that someone had stolen your contacts list and could send fake content to your friends and family. Given the amount of malware on the net, that's quite a reasonable proposition. How would you know it was a scam?