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New telephone scam - Your IP address has been compromised

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Baxenden Bank

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Just checked the messages on my answerphone.

Got one of those recorded messages where the first bit is cut off because the auto-dialler doesn't allow for gap between my telephone picking up and the beep to commence recording a message.

Anyway, in an American accent: my IP address has been compromised in several countries. It must be changed and I will get a free new router. Just press one to be connected to a technician.....

I thought I had heard them all. Anyone else had this one? I'm still waiting for HMRC to commence their several lawsuits.
 
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Lucan

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Technobabble. It is simple to find the IP address of any visitor to a website, and some websites I have visited tell me my own IP address - just to look smart I suppose. What "several countries" have to do with it I cannot imagine, and you don't need a new router to change the IP address, even if you needed to do so.

Not sure what the aim is with this one, perhaps it is to reverse the call charge to youself at a premium rate, or perhaps the "technician" would talk you into letting you install their malware supposedly to prepare for the "new router".
 

HSTEd

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Oh no, now they can send me messages that will be rejected by my router!

How terrible!
 

Jonny

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Even if they did manage to cause problems, you can still get a VPN and everything passing through the router is nicely scrambled so that the bad guys can't see.
 

dgl

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Not the best scam really given that most home broadband IP addresses are dynamically allocated changing the IP addresses can be as simple as turning the router off and on again, but it's the catch the fool trick used again.
Just tell them you have dial-up and thus have no router or if you really want to teach them a lesson inform them that you are from Microsoft technical support, if they don't hang up tell them they have a problem with their computer and offer to fix it. Just learn how to configure and use team viewer and messing up their machine (assuming they have one) is quite easy whatever the OS.

I'm guessing the "free" router needs a credit card for "verification" purposes.
 

Baxenden Bank

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Having re-listened to the message, the first bit goes on about "your internet will be disconnected within the next 24 hours", which I suppose is the bit meant to get me really panicked into responding to the message. Well, here I am on the internet over 24 hours later.

Plus, if it was a genuine problem, as they didn't leave any contact details, how would I call them back say, when I returned from work yesterday evening to resolve the problem?

The number gives the appearance of being in Slough, blocked now so they won't get through again. Just had another 0161 nuisance call. Things have been quite quiet for a few months and now an upsurge in March.
 

Baxenden Bank

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Just tell them you have dial-up...
Oh, I simply don't answer these calls. I used to play them along, or walk away and leave the phone off the hook, or if they were really lucky put the handset next to my stereo speakers and let them listen to some decent thrash metal!

Now, with caller ID and a modern handset, the number of everyone I know is in the handset so I know who is calling. If I don't recognise the number I let my secretary take the call (ie the answer-machine). If it is a friend in need, calling from a different number, they will leave a message or I can pick up. If a genuine business can't be bothered leaving a message, it can't be that important.
 

Lucan

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... if they don't hang up tell them they have a problem with their computer and offer to fix it. Just learn how to configure and use team viewer and messing up their machine ... is quite easy whatever the OS.
The scammers whom you first speak to are just phone monkeys following a script, and your offering to fix their computer would definitely depart from it, so good luck with that. I understand that if things get interesting (ie you sound like you are falling for it) they beckon over a real techie who will be at their elbow and is the one who will be doing the work once they have got you to install Team Viewer.

To string them along, I once went as far as letting some callers ("from Windows" they said, with Indian accents) install Team Viewer in WIndows XP running in a virtual machine under Linux. My nerve eventually failed and I shut down the VM and restored back to an earlier snapshot, although it shared no directories with the rest of my PC. The scammers were very slow and this episode took about 40 minutes.
 

krus_aragon

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We've had a variation of the "your internet will be disconnected within the next 24 hours", which referred to our ISP by name. My wife told them that she didn't know any of the security questions for the account, and asked for a number so I could phone them back later (and got one). They called again a few minutes later, at which point she noticed this "official" phonecall was originating from a mobile telephone number. She then clocked what was going on and hung up.
 

Xenophon PCDGS

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We've had a variation of the "your internet will be disconnected within the next 24 hours", which referred to our ISP by name. My wife told them that she didn't know any of the security questions for the account, and asked for a number so I could phone them back later (and got one). They called again a few minutes later, at which point she noticed this "official" phonecall was originating from a mobile telephone number. She then clocked what was going on and hung up.

My son had a call yesterday from one of these "people", claiming to be from BT so he asked them why they were not ringing from a BT 0800 telephone number. The line then went dead.

He says sometimes when these type of calls are made to him by such individuals with heavy Indian accents, as soon as he hears call centre noises in the background, he tells the caller that he is from Action Fraud UK and the call is being recorded. They always hang up as soon as this is said.
 

krus_aragon

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My son had a call yesterday from one of these "people", claiming to be from BT so he asked them why they were not ringing from a BT 0800 telephone number. The line then went dead.

He says sometimes when these type of calls are made to him by such individuals with heavy Indian accents, as soon as he hears call centre noises in the background, he tells the caller that he is from Action Fraud UK and the call is being recorded. They always hang up as soon as this is said.

My wife tells me that her conversation was with someone with a heavy Indian accent. I wonder whether such people are employed because they're cheaper, or in the belief that a (minor) obstacle to communication adds to the urgency of the situation, and discourages people from stopping and thinking about what's going on.
 

Lucan

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My wife tells me that her conversation was with someone with a heavy Indian accent. I wonder whether such people are employed because they're cheaper ....
Most of these calls come from India, it is a minor industry there. Thanks BT (and equivalents abroad) for so much reducing the costs of international calls in recent years. If you research the subject, you will find guys (Youtube is a good place to look) who have made a hobby of locating these scam centres even down to the street address, and they are offices with dozens or even hundreds of scam callers. In some of the calls you receive you can hear the buzz of the other voices in the background. It is professionally done. If the local police force is contacted, they are not interested, or rather they seem to regard it as a nice little earner and employer for their local economy.
 

Xenophon PCDGS

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At one time, these callers used a number which had too many digits and was not a recognised number as such, but these days the move seems for them to use a normal British telephone number as their "slave" telephone number that their overseas call links into.

One good way of dealing with such people in the old days who were "ringing about your Microsoft computer needing urgent remedial attention" was to say that you totally agreed with them about problems with Microsoft and that you had replaced all the Microsoft computers with Apple ones.
 
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MarlowDonkey

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Not the best scam really given that most home broadband IP addresses are dynamically allocated changing the IP addresses can be as simple as turning the router off and on again, but it's the catch the fool trick used again.

For that matter ask them how they correlate the phone number with the IP address.
 

najaB

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Thanks BT (and equivalents abroad) for so much reducing the costs of international calls in recent years.
On the other hand, thanks BT (and equivalents abroad) for making it feasible for me to speak with my parents in the Caribbean and girlfriend in South America on a regular basis without needing to take out a loan.
 
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PeterC

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Most of these calls come from India, it is a minor industry there. Thanks BT (and equivalents abroad) for so much reducing the costs of international calls in recent years. If you research the subject, you will find guys (Youtube is a good place to look) who have made a hobby of locating these scam centres even down to the street address, and they are offices with dozens or even hundreds of scam callers. In some of the calls you receive you can hear the buzz of the other voices in the background. It is professionally done. If the local police force is contacted, they are not interested, or rather they seem to regard it as a nice little earner and employer for their local economy.
I could never convince my late mother that scam calls were from remote call centres. She was convinced the cost must mean that they could only be local and if she upset somebody the "boys" could be round in a few minutes.
 

dgl

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For that matter ask them how they correlate the phone number with the IP address.
The ISP will log who had what IP address at what time thus they will be able to find out who had what IP address at what time, your home router does the same thing for internal connections unless disabled.

i.e. my desktop could be 192.168.0.2 one day and 192.168.0.2 another day, it generally doesn't matter a jot what the IP address is (unless needed for server type applications) and the router/DHCP server will just give you an IP address that is free at that time from an assigned range.
 

Xenophon PCDGS

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I took one of these "supposed BT" calls at 1030 this morning and after the usual "how are you today" mention in a heavy Indian accent, I said that the company was closed today as it was a Bank Holiday and I as the security officer on duty was not allowed to make any alterations to the company systems. The caller then just hung up.
 

Lucan

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my desktop could be 192.168.0.2 one day and 192.168.0.2 another day
That is a local network address, not the address by which you are seen on the internet.
it generally doesn't matter a jot what the IP address is (unless needed for server type applications) and the router/DHCP server will just give you an IP address that is free at that time from an assigned range.
It depends. You can pay more for a fixed IP address but the popular ISPs will use dynamic address allocation (DCHP) for their more competitive deals. Even so I believe that some or most ISPs will give you a "leased" address that you will keep unless the ISP runs out of addresses and you happen to be off line at the time. In other words you might have the same address for weeks even if you log on and off every day.

I never log off anyway, there is always something on. Also your employer might demand you use a fixed IP address if you work from home, so it can be checked when you log in as a security feature; I have a fixed one. You can find your IP address whether fixed or dynamic (and other interesting info) here for example :- https://whatismyipaddress.com/
 

najaB

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It depends. You can pay more for a fixed IP address but the popular ISPs will use dynamic address allocation (DCHP) for their more competitive deals.
Their most competitive deals are increasingly using CG-NAT rather than plain old vanilla DHCP dynamic IPs. In short, it means that the IP address you're allocated is shared rather than being uniquely assigned to your connection.
 

Lucan

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Their most competitive deals are increasingly using CG-NAT
I had not heard of that, but sounds like it comes with its own problems.

Meanwhile "next year" (every year) is supposed to be the year of IPv6 when there will be enough IP addresses for every atom in the universe :lol: I believe the world has already run out of IPv4 addresses (ie all the blocks have been allocated, not that every one has been used). Meanwhile certain large early IT companies and US government organisations were allocated such large blocks of IPv4 numbers back in the day before anyone dreamed that individual people would ever need them that they hold thousands or millions of them, unused or used on internal networks (even for printers etc) instead of following the recommended standards for private networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network which specifies using addresses such as the 192.168.x.x block mentioned earlier..
 

najaB

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I believe the world has already run out of IPv4 addresses (ie all the blocks have been allocated, not that every one has been used)
IIRC, IPv4 exhaustion happened about six years ago.
Meanwhile "next year" (every year) is supposed to be the year of IPv6 when there will be enough IP addresses for every atom in the universe
IPv6 is very much alive and well in provider networks, there's a very good chance (>90%) that there's a 4to6 conversion happening in the path between your device and the RailUK servers (which, sadly, isn't running a dual stack configuration meaning another 6to4 conversion). EC2 instances now come with both IPv4 and IPv6 by default which will significantly increase the amount of native IPv6 traffic as many service providers already run dual networks out as far as end-users but then end up with most of the traffic on IPv4 (since the websites/services were still IPv4).
 

Bedpan

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The last three or four posts are way beyond my comprehension, although i do recognise EC2 as being a postcode for the Bishopsgate area of Central London. If anybody would be kind enough to explain it all in plain English, it would be good to learn something.

BUT ANYWAY.... I had a call "about the car accident I had" recently and it dawned on me that I might not be speaking to a human being at all. The woman's voice said "I understand that you have had a car accident, is that right? To which I replied - "Tell me the what day it is to prove to me you are human", but all that happened was that she kept repeating the same question and then hung up. My guess is that the the machine recognises the word "Yes" and will then put you through to somebody, but will hang up if you say no.
 

PeterC

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BUT ANYWAY.... I had a call "about the car accident I had" recently and it dawned on me that I might not be speaking to a human being at all. The woman's voice said "I understand that you have had a car accident, is that right? To which I replied - "Tell me the what day it is to prove to me you are human", but all that happened was that she kept repeating the same question and then hung up. My guess is that the the machine recognises the word "Yes" and will then put you through to somebody, but will hang up if you say no.
Most that I had about my accident were at least from real humans. I am still sure that they were wrong though and having somebody drive into your empty parked car doesn't qualify you for a personal injury claim.
 

najaB

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The last three or four posts are way beyond my comprehension, although i do recognise EC2 as being a postcode for the Bishopsgate area of Central London. If anybody would be kind enough to explain it all in plain English, it would be good to learn something.
Sorry, I forget sometimes that I'm not a real person. :)
IPv6 is very much alive and well in provider networks, there's a very good chance (>90%) that there's a 4to6 conversion happening in the path between your device and the RailUK servers (which, sadly, isn't running a dual stack configuration meaning another 6to4 conversion). EC2 instances now come with both IPv4 and IPv6 by default which will significantly increase the amount of native IPv6 traffic as many service providers already run dual networks out as far as end-users but then end up with most of the traffic on IPv4 (since the websites/services were still IPv4).
Translation: The next generation of IP addressing is alive and well in the internal networks of Internet service providers, there's a high chance that traffic that originates using the currently dominant IPv4 will actually be sent over a IPv6 network between you and RailUK (which, sadly, doesn't operate both IPv4 and IPv6 so the traffic would need to be reconverted from IPv6 back to IPv4 to reach RailUK). Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute virtual servers now have both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled by default which should help speed up the adoption of IPv6 since many Internet service providers run IPv6 networks but end up with most of the traffic using IPv4 because the websites/servers that customers are using only had IPv4 addresses.
 

Bedpan

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Most that I had about my accident were at least from real humans. I am still sure that they were wrong though and having somebody drive into your empty parked car doesn't qualify you for a personal injury claim.
In relation to the calls I've been getting, I don't think it matters whether or not you have had an accident, I haven't, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have no idea who you are, and they phone on the off chance. I daresay though that there may be a way of accident management companies getting details of people who really have had made a claim accidents and phoning them up.
 

Bedpan

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Sorry, I forget sometimes that I'm not a real person. :)
Translation: The next generation of IP addressing is alive and well in the internal networks of Internet service providers, there's a high chance that traffic that originates using the currently dominant IPv4 will actually be sent over a IPv6 network between you and RailUK (which, sadly, doesn't operate both IPv4 and IPv6 so the traffic would need to be reconverted from IPv6 back to IPv4 to reach RailUK). Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute virtual servers now have both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled by default which should help speed up the adoption of IPv6 since many Internet service providers run IPv6 networks but end up with most of the traffic using IPv4 because the websites/servers that customers are using only had IPv4 addresses.

Ha ha, :lol::lol: I hope that you are not the sort of "not a real person" who makes calls about phantom car accidents that I was referring to above LOL. :lol::lol:

Thanks for the explanation which my dinosaur brain just about understands.
 

Tetchytyke

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My guess is that the the machine recognises the word "Yes" and will then put you through to somebody, but will hang up if you say no.

It also hangs up if you call them a c***, which rather spoils the fun.

Yes, the call is voice recognition software, cheaper even than an Indian call centre.
 

Xenophon PCDGS

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Today, one of those " supposedly from BT scam" calls was made to our residence and this time, the caller was a female with quite a "cultured and clear" business voice, rather a cut above the normal "scam" female callers. Her attitude from the start was curt and she was insistent that her requests for me to go to my computer were carried out without delay. When informed that BT do not make such cold calls and that I had an e-mail from BT to state that matter and of their advice not to have anything to do with telephone requests made to us, the female then suddenly became very abusive and described me in very vulgar terms before hanging up.
 
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