The number of advertising calls we’ve been getting at home have jumped recently. Still nowhere near the number American households apparantly get, but the spike has been noticeable here.
First of all, quite a few ‘silent’ callers. We get a phone call and after a few seconds of silence the caller hangs up. This happens once every few days, and immediately raises thoughts of burglers checking to see if the house is empty.,,, although I’m probably being paranoid – a friend gets similar calls and BT apparantly discovered they were international, so unless the burglers were planning to fly over…..
Secondly, we have started to get those dire automated calls. You pick up the phone and the machine starts its pitch “Hi there, you’ve won a holiday. All you have to do is call our £50/minute premiu…..”. I usually hang up about there.
Finally, we’ve just gotten a call which triggered my alarm bells more than usual. An Irish caller, speaking very fast with a noisy background. Couldn’t hear a word he said. Eventually, after I got him to repeat his little intro speech about five times, I discovered it was about a ‘holiday we entered about 18 months ago’. Still couldn’t make out the company name. All I had to do was confirm my details. Having had a recent dose of Kevin Mitnick’s book about social engineering I immediately developed a bout of paranoia about this. “This is some random guy, quite unclear about his company, asking me to confirm details…” I asked him for more information about the company and the competition. The intro speech was repeated (I think…), so I said, with a vocal scepticism, ‘go on then…’ – at that point the bastard hung up.
I know it’s supposedly quite easy to wean useful information from people. If the last guy’s questions included asking for my date of birth and mother’s maiden name, he has two bits of information regularly used elsewhere in security forms. Under the guise of a competition, I reckon those details and more can be quite easily had. Perhaps I’m being too reluctant, but I suspect that one can never be too cautious!