by Ray745
I was just called on my Verizon Wireless cell phone, the caller ID showed up as “Voicemail” – I thought, that’s odd. I usually don’t answer calls if I don’t know the person, but I answered this one. Immediately a robot starts talking saying it is Verizon and fraud has been detected on my account, press 1 to deactivate your account or press 2 to speak to a customer service rep. So I press 2 and a woman is on the other line saying she works at Verizon Wirelss and fraudulent activity may have been found on my account. She asks me if I ordered an Iphone XS to North Caroline. I live in New Jersey so I said no I did not. She asks me if I know a certain persons name and address, again I say I don’t know that person or address. She says ok there has been fraud on your account, we’re going to lock it down and take care of that for you, for your security we are going to send you a number through text, when you get that please read it back to me. The text comes and it says something to the effect of:
“Below is your temporary password. Please remember Verizon will never contact you to ask for this number.
23482349 (bunch of random numbers)”
Thankfully I read the full text. I said to the woman “It says here Verizon will never contact me to ask for this number.” She doesn’t miss a beat and responds with “Yes we will only ask for that number when we call you before hand and tell you what we are doing, that is to prevent any scammers from getting their hands on it.” So I responded “Like you?” She continued to go on saying how she works at Verizon and needs the number to prevent this fraud right away. I then hung up on her and called Verizon with the number from their website just to be sure there was no fraud, and of course there wasn’t.
What these people did is they went to VerizonWireless.com and entered my phone number into the username/password login form. You can login with your number on vzw. So they put in my number and click forgot password, which resets your password and texts you a new one. If I had given that number that was texted to me to this woman she would have then been able to reset my account password to whatever she wanted and I wouldn’t have been able to get back into my account. She could have ordered herself whatever she wanted from within my account. So please beware, if someone calls you from a company and says there is fraud hang up on them immediately and call the company from a number on their website. It will cost you only about 30 seconds and save you a ton of trouble!