Telephone scams

Blog
1

Our life in France




Our life in France - beware all you expats - Telephone scams

The Indian call centres have finally found France - we have for the last few days been bombarded with calls from Indian call centres pretending to be calling from Microsoft, they are most definitely not calling from Microsoft - go here to read about it in this article in the Guardian, please be careful out there all of you expats and our French friends of course as they are clearly going through the telephone book.
we were getting at least 3 calls per day until I told them we didn't have a computer and they hung up, this must prompt them to take you off the list as they then have no use for you.

Let me know if you have had such calls please in the comments.
2

We keep getting what sounds like the same lady for different products; changing mutuelle, offering a year's free supply of Royal Jelly capsules etcetc. She denies having called me before though so maybe I'm wrong....sounds Asian but not Indian though. Now I look carefully at the number that show on the phone before picking it up, and enter people in the phone's address book by name so it's instantly visible.

3

So much for being on the call preference list, it clearly doesn't work

4

I know from Indian friends in my own field of work that there are call centres in Bangalore with up to 20,000 people working day and night. Many of our PV sales calls seem to come from there given detectable accents, the few Microsoft and other sales pitches too. These people work with auto-dialling, so nobody is taken off lists for any reason. With the PV I recently lied by saying we already had it to which I got a reply that it was from a non-EDF contractor because there is no record of us held by them therefore we should have a new survey and replace it all. When I said it was a private integrated system without sell back or any such arrangement I was told it could not be because I required EDF permission. The bottom line is that on the one hand they only get paid for hits such as getting a survey and then a top up for a sale. Part of their mandate is to push aside rivals. The hold fairly detailed data as well. But whatever you say, you will sooner or later hear again.

5

Used to get these all of the time in the UK but have had none here as we only use the internet phone and not our actual landline. The internet number doesn’t appear in the Pages Blanches, youpi!!