Thursday, January 05, 2012
Rishab
If you are a Vodafone subscriber and are getting some call on your phone flashing numbers starting with +224, +92 or +23, its better not to attend the call. For, attending these calls or calling back these numbers could allegedly end up swelling up your bill. Tamil Nadu Vodafone subscribers are said to have been receiving calls from such anonymous numbers which seems to either inflate the bill of post-paid subscribers significantly or wipe out the balance of pre-paid customers. According to Vodafone, such problem was also witnessed in UP also some time back. “This is something which has been happening with all the operators from last six to eight months,” claimed an official from Vodafone.
Taking note of the problem, Vodafone has issued an alert to its customers to ignore such calls. “We would like to inform all our customers in Tamil Nadu that this issue has been brought to our notice and we are currently investigating the same. At the same time we would like to urge our customers to kindly ignore such calls and not call back on those numbers,” Vodafone has said in a statement. In the wake of such calls, the company has urged its customers to alert the customer care and report the number to them.
However, assuring safety to its customers, the company said, “Vodafone takes safety and security very seriously and we have invested considerable resources to continually evolve our system and improve security.”
Earlier, Airtel had issued a general advisory to caution its telecom customers who are being arbitrarily targeted by calls fraudulently claiming the recipient customer as being a prize/lottery winner. “In these types of phone frauds, the customer returns a missed call to a +92 or +375 country code and inadvertently reaches a fraudster pretending to be representative of Airtel or another Indian mobile operator and informs the customer of having won some lottery or prize money. The fraudster then attempts to trick the customer into divulging sensitive personal information and to pay a commission to receive the winnings. Such commission is usually asked to be paid via an international DTH operator’s recharge vouchers,” it had said. It had said such malicious activities may result in substantial increase in customers phone bill. The company had said advised its customers not to respond to any unexpected calls from a number with the +92 or +375 country code.
“Do not get lured into any financial transactions or divulge any personal information like IMEI, bank account number and other information to callers offering prize money or lottery winnings. Also do not respond to any instructions to dial an international number to get the prize money,” the company had advised.
