Scammers Use Fake Calls to Distract From Real Bank Scam

I still don't understand how the scam works. If the bank calls to notify about the change, don't they wait for your confirmation to execute the change?

Try Union Bank.

yeah this article wasn't really written well to explain what happens (sorry 800notes!) but from what i see what happens is that the scammer will bombard your phone line to prevent any other calls coming in, so that way if the bank tries to contact you to verify that you are calling them, it there will be a busy signal, making look like you are calling them at the time.  Perhaps there are some banks that don't verify in very fine detail.

I would suggest getting a voicemail set up so when you are busy it will switch to that.  If your voicemail gets filled up quickly, then that should indicate a problem and possibly give the telecommunication company something to go on.

St Augustine Record    
   
Phone attacks hit dental offices
Doctors fear practices could be crippled
Posted: November 29, 2009 - 12:30am

By CHAD SMITH

There are two Robert Thousands in St. Augustine who practice dentistry, and both have contacted police saying they have been the victims of systematic telephone harassment that could cripple their practices.

Robert Thousand III's cell phone and the phone at his office have been ringing non-stop for nearly two weeks. but the only calls that come through are 30- to 45-second recordings of a 1-900 sex line.

And they don't stop.

Thousand, a root canal specialist, said he gets between 400 and 500 calls a day and is worried that his practice is in jeopardy, predicting it has bled tens of thousands of dollars since the calls started Nov. 14.

But police and the telephone company say there's little they can do for now, prompting Thousand to wonder how vulnerable businesses are to this brand of "cyberterrorism" and to ask what would stop government offices or 911 services from becoming victims too.

His father, Robert Thousand Jr., a periodontist in World Golf Village, has had the same problem.

"It seems like it's targeted toward us for some reason," the elder Thousand said. "Who knows?"

Police got subpoenas to trace the calls and determined they were made over the Internet through programs like Skype from computers across the country and in the British Virgin Islands.

No information was available from authorities on how widespread the problem is.

The younger Thousand said he and his father had no "obvious enemies" but felt it was too much of a coincidence that both were receiving the calls.

On Nov. 17, his office manager called police.

A St. Johns County sheriff's deputy responded and listened to the calls, which were always a "female asking them to press the number 3 . . . for more sexual options."

Then a male voice would come on the line "speaking in a sexual tone," the deputy wrote in a report.

"While I was there for the first 10 minutes, I observed approximately 50 calls come into the (business) line," he wrote.

The deputy called AT&T, which handles the Thousands' phone lines, and filed a report with the company's annoyance hotline.

Gretchen Schultz, an AT&T spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail that the company was investigating the Thousands' complaints.

"We are looking into the matter, however it will take some time to investigate," Schultz wrote. "We do take this matter seriously and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused the customer."

The Sheriff's Office has assigned a detective to the case, but the calls were still coming in as of Friday.

"We're going to try to determine what it is," department spokesman Kevin Kelshaw said. "We'll have detectives looking into it, but, as far as the progress of the case, I don't think it's very far because the calls just came in."

On Monday, a Ponte Vedra Beach resident filed a similar complaint with the Sheriff's Office, saying he was getting "phone calls from an adult solicitation company" on his Nextel cell phone and his AT&T work line.

But, he told a deputy, the companies said they could not block the perpetrators' numbers at this time.

For now, it seems, there is little he and the Thousands can do but shut off their cell phones and ignore their landlines.

"It's scary," Thousand III said, "and it's going to hurt us."

Follow the money.   The money being drained from these accounts is going somewhere.  Sure bet it is an overseas scam using zombie computers (taken over by a hacker with a virus) to make the avalanche of phone calls.  Probably how they got the victims' account numbers as well.  The scam doesn't work until somebody on the other end gets the money.   The government (oh God, we're screwed...) has to determine where these scams are centered and move on the banks and accounts where this money is going.   Until the government makes the offending banks and nations pay a price for their complicity (because they know exactly what is going on) for his kind of crime, it will never end.

If the person has call waiting or voice mail this scam probably wouldn't work.

Why wouldn't Skype have a way to prevent this?  It seems easy.  If more than a reasonable number of calls are being made to a single phone number, don't let them through.

Get a Panasonic KX-TH1213, KX-TG9334T OR A KX-TG 9333T these phones have last number blocking and should take care of the problem.

Seems to me that it would be beneficial to change their numbers!  The phone company offers call blocking.  How come it doesn't work in this case?!?

this is just another reason why we leave our land line message machine on 24 hours a day and never answer unless we hear a person we know.  our land line  blocks all caller numbers because we use their DSL, which is the only way to get internet here.  scammers do this all the time, so we just don't answer.
I do get curious after days of these attacks, so, here is the number to avoid: 866-492-4704

If you have a business, you just can't change your number. You have advertisements and yellow page listings with that number. You have clients who have your number in their address books. Your business is wholly dependent on people being able to reach you at that number.

Try City National Bank in Los Angeles. They will not ever admit you have an existing account unless they have already verified who they are talking with and that being the account holder. and, they typically will have someone call from your home branch that is known to you personally.

This works on my Samsung Impression, for a week or so until they call from a new number in a new location!  I've had calls from New Jersey, New York, Florida (three different numbers there) California (4 different numbers there) and now two different numbers from Texas! If you search the number and look at the street address it will be a run down old house in an older neighborhood. They claim to be calling from a law office, however the number is always unlisted!  I told them to file their petition if they have a case against me and they had no idea what I was talking about! Just threaten to have me "arrested and dragged into court"! Pffft! I work for the courts! They are nothing but lowlife scammers!

good article att willl do nothing about it either they protect the perpitrator