Bank Just Rang, Wants My Personal Information
I have just been rung by an automated phone system that said it was from Lloyds TSB, and that it wanted to check some suspect activity on my credit card with me. Fine. But then it asked me for my date of birth.
Purely for the next time one of Google's spiders passes by, the number was 0845 6306967 - and to catch other search variants, that could also be written as 08456306967, 08456 306967, or perhaps even 0845 630 69 67. I'm such a keyword whore.
Anyway, I hung up and rang the customer services number on the back of my credit card. I checked with them that the phone number is valid - and if anybody googling after a call is worried, it is legitimate, it is not a phishing attempt. It is actually First Alert, who seem to run fraud prevention services for a range of credit card companies. They ring you when they spot something dodgy happening on your account, so equally, don't ignore it.
In my case it turned out that they had put a block on my account after somebody tried to spend £10 with a German telephone company at 2am GMT, five times. They got the security code wrong the first time, got the expiry date wrong the second time, and although the third, fourth and fifth attempts were correct, they were refused because they were all within a couple of minutes of the other two fraudulent transactions.
"Ah," I said. "That would have been me." Well, that's what happens when you try to rush setting up an Asterisk server to forward incoming calls to your mobile, and your favourite catchphrase starts with "If at first you don't succeed"...
So that's all fine - nice they picked up on the dodgy transactions. However, the thing that I can't get over is that they asked for my personal information.
Fair enough that they need to confirm who I am for data protection reasons. That's good, protect my data, little bank minions. But surely they should be training customers to not give out details on demand?
Instead of advocating giving out personal details to anyone who rings, they should be telling me to ring them back with the number on the back of my card. It's no wonder so many people fall victim to phishers.
Comments
That is quite a strange thing to do. They really should ask you to call them back instead, which would be so much more convincing.
In Denmark, they just block your card, and hope you notice, apparently. It happened to a friend of mine, which was quite all right since he hadn't made the attempted transfers.
Well it was a good job they didn't block it altogether, I had to use it the next morning to buy my train ticket!
But yes, they really should ask you to call them back - on the ones hand they're preaching to never hand out personal information, and the next they're ringing you up asking for it.
And then they complain when you get phished :p
I had a very similar thing - I received a letter from Abbey asking me to send lots of personal information (date of birth, signature, account number, sort code) to an address in Andover. And if I had any questions, I should call a number which wasn't the standard Abbey customer service.
I thought it was suspicious, so called the standard number, but it turns out that it was totally legitimate. I decided to no longer be a customer of Abbey!
Wow, that's pretty special. At least mine didn't want all that from me!
I like eyes
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