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[Bowdon]

It seems the scam calls are starting to increase in number. I thought BT was introducing something to clamp down on these calls?

I hope BT hurry up and transfer all support staff back to UK soon.

It's sad these days that India is getting such a bad reputation. Talk about a country making itself in to a negative stereotype. It's getting to a point when I hear an Indian accent I am cautious about the call.

[Weaver]

It’s just down to management penny-pinching - employing staff with easily comprehensible English is just a basic common sense requirement for any such job. Why on earth did such companies ever think that they would get away with such stupidity?

[Bowdon]

I agree.. and think of how many people these call centres could employ if they were based in UK.

It would be a win win situation. I think BT need to spend money to maintain its strong brand. It's time BT, and other companies started bringing jobs back here imho.

[phi2008]

There was an interview with one of the Indian tech support scammers(not BT, but general tech support) on YouTube, basically he knew exactly what he was doing when he took the job but it pays better than the typical tech support job his peers might take - however he felt a bit bad about it which will no doubt satisfy the pensioners on low incomes he scams for hundreds of dollars, and anybody with a suitable amount of middle class first world guilt. 

I was recently targeted by an eBay scam that was a bit more sophisticated than usual. First my phone started to ring over and over again playing a recorded message talking about an eBay transaction and asking me to press one if I was not expecting the call. I didn't respond and soon my answering service was full up with about 12 calls over 30 minutes.

Later I checked my e-mails and found a batch of "eBay" transaction messages about the same time as the calls. The idea was clearly to trigger me to respond to the phone call. The concerning thing is that my phone number is ex-directory and not part of normal eBay transactions - you have to request personal details, so I'm guessing the fraudster has a full profile of my name, address, and other details provided to the scam artist who will answer the phone - probably gleaned from non-eBay sources. I suppose this information may well be used for other criminal purposes in future. 

[sevenlayermuddle]

I had no less than six calls from Indian call centres claiming to be "BT Openreach Technical Dept" yesterday, all wangting to warn me about viruses on my internet connection.  Each had a different calling line ID, one even claiming to be local - same UK area code as myself.  In each case I was able to annoy them enough to get them to swear at me, always cheers me up.   

But in the middle of it all, I got another call from an Indian call centre.  As usual, there was a second or two's pause, while the predictive caller was connected to an available 'sucker'.   This time again, it was "BT Openreach", but wanting to talk to me about my phone line, as opposed to my internet connection.  And that one was genuine, I'd had a phone fault for several days that was cleared yesterday morning, they were calling to make sure I was happy for them to close the fault.  Thankfully I immediately twigged it was genuine, and was nice to them.   

The point is though, as  long as BT persist in using Indian call centres, and expect their customers to take Indian call centres seriously, they can't really be surprised when their customers fall for scams from Indian call centres.