My wife got a call from Comcast/Xfinity today

Yes dear. Do you think it's time to look into some home security, dear?

My security is a baseball bat leaning beside the door.

Mother in law (87) widow, lives alone, got a phone call from a "nice, polite young man" who worked for "your bank". She helpfully asked, "You mean NatWest?". He went on to tell her that her account had been "hacked" and he needed all the account information to "lock it down". It was only the fact that sister-in-law was visiting at the time that stopped MIL reading out the sort code and account number, and giving her mother's maiden name. "But he was so polite."

MIL now has special phone which blocks unknown callers. Next step may be power of attorney arrangement with bank.

I had my phone blocked, calls stopped for a day, but most are from abroad and use a number which you can't call back on. Do 1471 and google the number, there's a 'who called me' website that will tell you what scammers are using this.

Unfortunately a racist attitude helps, in the UK at least, most if not all of the scammers hail from the Indian subcontinent. They all have strong Indian accents and sometimes very English names. The minute I pick the phone up and hear an Indian accent I'm on my guard.

This was a bit awkward when my MIL was in a care home and most of the care workers had strong Indian accents, I was always very suspicious.

This is a special handset. If a number calling in is in the memory, it rings normally, if it isn't, the caller gets a request to record their name after the beep, and the handset then rings with a special ring, plays the name to MIL and asks her to press 1 to pick up or to hang up to reject.


Or Irish. An awful lot of blokes called "Kevin" in India, in my experience.

At the moment the two most popular claims are being either from Microsoft or BT.

One said "I'm calling from your ISP". I said "And who is that?". Pause. "BT?" I replied, "You've used up one of your three guesses. Try again.". Reply, accent getting much thicker: "You had sex with your father!", then "Kevin" hung up.

That sounds like BT.

I live in the Netherlands, and the Microsoft 'folk' call here too. It's not hard to recognize this as a scam, since most large companies won't spontaneously call their clients anyway. Besides, they do sound as if they come from India too.

If I'm in the mood, I'll string em along for a bit. And when they inevitably ask what I see, I'll reply something like: "I see dead people", or "I see a pink forest with unicorns and yellow zebras."

Pretty stupid I guess, but it amuses me to imagine what they are thinking on the other end of the line. Still, the problem is serious, and as per usual, governments on all sides seem to do little to nothing to stop this sort of phishing.

Comcast doesnt offer home security..it offers internet and tv. lol