‘Your daughter needs cash’ and six other active scams to watch out for

The mystery caller

You get a phone call in the middle of night from an unknown number. You ring back and are kept on the line. It’s a premium rate number and you have just racked up a €40 phone bill.

Most people appear to have received such calls. Some smartphones now identify the location the call is being made from. I got one recently from Ascension Island.

How had the scammer got my number? Then I realised that it was pretty easy. It’s on my Facebook account profile. It’s on emails I send out. It has probably been hacked during data breaches of companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn, to name but two, in recent times. What’s annoying about this racket is that the regulator Comreg does not appear to be able to do anything about it. It says the calls have to be paid for as things stand because the phone company racks up a bill routing your call through several networks to the remote location. However, the telecoms watchdog told me that new regulations will come into force on December 31 enabling consumers to bar premium rate numbers on request, free of charge. Mobile network operators must also inform their subscribers via text message of the availability of barring facilities and how to use them.

The cry for help

You get a call, email or message to say your daughter is in trouble abroad. She needs money – fast. The caller knows her name. This isn’t hard to work out – you may proudly post it on Facebook, without using privacy settings. Or like one gentlemen in Cork did recently, you may let her name slip during the early part of the conversation.

‘He was told she’s in bother. She’s lost her cards,’ said Peter Horgan, a Labour parliamentary assistant specialising in broadband and communications. The victim was a constituent who complained of the issue to him.

‘He was asked to help with a bank transfer of €3,000 to buy her flights back and pay bills. He did it. The bank couldn’t stop him. They kept saying are you sure you want to transfer the money? And he insisted. He thought his daughter was in trouble.’

The ‘technician’

In the old version, a technician claiming to be from Microsoft rang asking if your computer was slow, offering to fix it. In the latest, it’s the caller claims to be from Eir and says your internet has been compromised. The caller will attempt to extract sensitive details from you. Peter Horgan had two such calls himself lately. ‘The disconcerting thing is that the timing of these calls target vulnerable elderly people who will be at home,’ he said.

Work-related scams

Your ‘boss’ emails or texts you

telling you pay money into an client’s account in a hurry.

Your natural instinct is to obey.

But work-related blogs and social media sites such as Linked-in mean it’s easy to find out key information about chief executives and pretend to be them.

Think twice if contacted outside work hours in this way by ‘the boss’.

Romance scams

A person befriends you, or becomes romantically involved, and then scams or extorts money from you.

‘It commonly takes place on online dating websites, but scammers often use social media or email to make contact,’ warns a Garda spokesman.

Typically, the scammer will invent some pressing need for cash – money for a flight to see you or for an operation.

One Irish-based woman I know met a foreign ‘gentleman’ online.

He then asked her to pay some outrageous sum to liberate a package for her that was ‘held up’ by Irish customs – or so he claimed.

She saw through this immediately and ended the relationship. But the stories get ever more imaginative and convincing.

Even more unscrupulous scammers are now using sites such as Tinder to lure victims into relationships. They then blackmail them – in what has become known as sextortion – about releasing embarrassing information or photographs on their social media account. Several Irish men are known to have been caught out in this way.

Your bank needs your account data

Your bank calls you to warn that your account has been compromised. You need to transfer funds fast to a new account in Dubai. This old trick led to a Limerick pensioner in his 70s recently transferring a sum of €10,000 into a scammer’s account. He believed the story. But no financial institution would ask for such financial details over the phone.