xmas scam warning

[Bonefish]

Can you circulate this around especially as Christmas is fast approaching - it has been confirmed by Royal Mail. The Trading Standards Office are making people aware of the following scam:
A card is posted through your door from a company called PDS (Parcel Delivery Service) suggesting that they were unable to deliver a parcel and that you need to contact them on 0906 6611911 (a premium rate number). DO NOT call this number, as this is a mail scam originating from Belize .
If you call the number and you start to hear a recorded message you will already have been billed £15 for the phone call.

Please advise family members/Friends.

[jelv]

Whilst it is useful to remind people to be aware of scams, this is in fact a hoax - there is no £15 premium rate tariff.

A Google search for some of the text in the letter throws up any number of references.

[-\- Brains -/- FlexiBug -\-]

I second that..

[greenman]

I thought that any number starting with 09 was some sort of premium rate number, and therefore to be avoided.
Just something that i always seemed to have in my head!!

Could be wrong?

Cheers,
Greenman

PS direct dialing code for Russia is

007

[Batchoy]

Whilst this particular message is a hoax that has been circulating for the last three or four years, it does have some basis in fact and it does serve as salutary warning about dialing premium rate numbers, which can charge anything between 5p and £1.50 per minute. Similarly with sending texts to numbers you don't recognise where you can be charged back additional fees up to £5 per text, or find yourself with monthly recurring charge back billing.

Ideally when phoning you should stick to local, 01, 02, 03 and 0800 land-line numbers anything else 09, 0870, 0845 etc and somebody other than the phone companies is taking a cut off the top and making money off of your call. If an organisation only advertises non-geographic numbers i.e. 09, 0870 etc numbers either don't ring them or look for alternative numbers on www.saynoto0870.com. Another thing to note is that alot of the new phone contracts where you are supposed to get free calls or volumes of minutes do not include the non-geographic numbers and you can get penalized even further for using them, so it pays to read the small print.

You should also watch calling mobiles from landlines as you can particularly on business tariffs get charged differing rate depending on the mobile operator, and since there has been the ability to port numbers from one network to another there is no way of telling which network you are calling. Hence why when I had the new phone system put in at work I had a GSM gateway installed. This basically hangs a mobile phone line (in our case 4 SIMS so 4 mobile lines) off the internal phone network, as a result all outgoing calls to mobiles are routed out on a mobile connection and not on the landlines, thus charging the calls to the inclusive minutes on our mobile contract, and making calls between the office and company mobiles free.