[TriLUG] where to report scam phone call

[Jeremy Portzer]

On 11/3/2011 8:17 AM, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
>
> I almost got taken in by the "I'm in London and got mugged and lost my 
> credit cards, plane tickets and passport. I need to pay my hotel bill" 
> scam. The mail was from someone I know on a local (non-computer) 
> mailing list. I thought I'd wait to hear something from people on the 
> list who were his friends. He does travel to London, but he'd been in 
> town all along. His gmail account had been cracked. He never e-mailed 
> any of us to tell us he was OK. I just read the other day that this is 
> a well known scam and so phoned up someone on the mailing list to find 
> that the fellow had been in town all along.

I had an interesting one like this a few years ago where someone rang my 
office - which is the Sydney (Australia) branch office of a larger, 
US-based company.  The caller claimed to be, let's say, Bob Johnson, who 
was a US employee and said he was in Japan and called our office since 
we were in the same time zone.  He had a lot of information about our 
company, office locations, etc, and Bob Johnson was a real employee in 
the US, so at first it seemed legit.  He wanted me to email various 
information to his email account, I can't remember the details, but 
ultimately it indicated to me that he had the password to that account 
but was trying to get more information about our company.  However, 
there were two giveaways:  checking the company directory, Bob Johnson 
was a salesperson with a territory in Alabama, Louisiana, etc, and would 
have absolutely no reason to be traveling on business in Japan.  Also, 
"Bob Johnson" had a noticeable Indian accent... groomed to sound 
half-American, but definitely not what I'd expect a Bob Johnson from 
Alabama to sound like!

I managed to locate Bob's home phone number, called him at about 3:00 AM 
where answered with an sleepy but definitely Alabama-sounding accent, 
and told him to change his password (which he did immediately).  I 
reported all of this to the IT security team and they promised to look 
into it, but all they really found out (that I know of) is that the 
calls from the "attacker" came from a VoIP system somewhere outside 
Australia.  The imposter later called back and I tried to string him on 
a bit further to try to understand what kind of information he needed, 
but ultimately he realized I was suspicious and he hung up.

--Jeremy