Warning: Beware of phone calls from cellphone providers

This is a story from a recent news:
It all started with a call on my cellphone. I looked at the call display. It was from my cellphone provider, so I answered it.


The man on the other end said he was with the fraud department and asked if I had ordered any cellphones for delivery.

I responded, "no."

He said the order had been flagged as possible fraud and he wanted to verify if I knew the name of the individual who had ordered the phones and the address to which they were to be sent. He threw out the name and address and I replied again, "no." No harm in that. No personal questions had been asked, so I still believed a real fraud may have occurred.

While on the phone, I was sitting at my computer, and had started to further verify the phone number on my call display against the customer service number on the provider’s website. It matched.

The “fraud investigator” then proceeded to tell me that my account had somehow been hacked and my password had been changed, as well as my personal identification code which I had established as further protection. I was at work and could not remember my password to login to verify what he was saying. My heart started thumping and I was beginning to believe it may be true.

I listened further and he said he would text a code to my phone to reset everything. It never came. Then he said he would try again. Still nothing. At that point I mentioned I would try to log in later and call back.

He quickly responded saying the account would be locked for at least 24 hours and because it was flagged as fraud and a new PIN established, it could be difficult to get things sorted out.

Hmm...that sounded fishy. Now I was beginning to think he didn’t sound as professional as other representatives I had dealt with in the past.

He tried to keep me on the phone and I suspect that, since I hadn’t received any text with reset code, he would try to get some personal information from me. I thanked him for the information and said I would call back to verify and I hung up.

I did not hit redial but instead, again, verified the customer service number for my provider. I called. I entered my PIN and got a representative who told me everything was fine with my account and that they had been getting a lot of inquiries from customers about this type of scam.
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