Couple of days ago had a phone call from Talktalk - or so the Asian gentleman named "David" told me. Before he started his spiel I said I wanted to talk to him as there are sometimes problems with incoming e-mails - any that are form talktalk address won't come in - this temds to happen mid or late morning. If I just stop the send/receive then the messages will come in later - some have taken a few days.
Anyway, he said he would look into it for me and send me a new router, but first wanted me to press the Windows button on my keyboard, which I did. That brought up another window to login a code, which he gave me. Then asked me to confirm something so I refused as I was getting very suspicious.
I asked him to prove he was from talktalk - he knew my name, address and post code, and obviously my phone number. I said I was not going to continue further without proof. He told me to get one of the latest talktalk bills and confirm the account number. I took some time finding one and he was getting rather impatient.
Having found a bill he asked me for the account number. No, I said, you tell me - and he was able to give me the account number, although I said it wasn't correct. After more dialogue trying to persuade me to continue, he hung up - obviously upset at having wasted about 20 minutes of his life.
His phone number was shown on my phone - so I googled it (01773 STD code) and it came up with a name and address in Witney, Oxfordshire. I googled the post code and the address was a private house in the middle of a very large housing estate. I googled the name of the person and that came up with a different phone number (0870 code) so could have been a business number.
I then rang talktalk, using the number that was on the bill for customer enquiries. They had no record of anyone ringing me and were grateful for all the info I gave them about the alleged caller (phone number, name, address) and the woman there said she would pass it on to their fraud department.
The first guy sounded really genuine other than he gave his name as David - my name is David but I don't think I'd get away with calling myself by an Asian name! Getting my name, address and phone number would be relatively easy - but how did he get my talktalk account number?
