Phone call prompts scam warning on ‘Spark’ calls
Sue Emeny
A Dannevirke woman is warning others after having received a phone call that she believes was a scam.
Gill Allardice said she had a call from a woman claiming to be calling on behalf of Spark.
“I believe they are picking on older women as I have had two friends receive the same phone call,” Allardice said.
“The caller said ‘We need to let you know your phone account is overdue. In 24 hours your phone and internet will be disconnected. What we need you to do is to work with us to get you reconnected.”
Allardice said at the point in the conversation she hung up as she realised it was a scam call.
“Another reason I knew it was a scam was that I had paid my Spark account the week before so I knew it wasn’t overdue.”
Allardice said she immediately rang Spark and they told her there was nothing untoward with her account.
“They said they would only investigate if I had a total of three calls. But they said the calls come from an overseas number and were hard to trace.”
Allardice also rang Police who said they want to be told of calls such as these as they wanted to establish if there was a pattern to them.
She believes the scam targets older people as they are the ones who still have landlines.
“I’ve had two of my friends receive the same calls. We’ve all just hung up as soon as we realised what was happening. If you talk to them they can hook into your phone and you can end up with a huge toll big so it’s imperative you hang up straight away.” Allardice said what was disconcerting was that the woman calling sounded very professional.
“She had a beautiful speaking voice. She sounded very well educated.” She urged older people to be very careful when receiving phone calls.
“There are a lot of us daffy old ones out there who are used to trusting phone calls on our landlines.”