Hackers keep diverting my mothers landline

[Keith_Beddoe]

@fatbelly 

Please refer to this post https://community.bt.com/t5/Home-phone-including-Digital/Hackers-keep-diverting-my-mothers-landline/...

The moderators are not authorised to deal with enquiries without you providing them with the account number of the affected account.

If you are not authorised to act on behalf of your mother, then she would need to speak to BT herself. The moderators can contact her, provided that you provide them with the details requested. Private messages to the moderators are confidential, and cannot be viewed on this forum, or anywhere else.

[tarbat]

Exactly the same thing happened to us last Wednesday. hacker reported a fault on our landline, got BT to setup call divert to their mobile phone, and then attempted to access my online bank service. Seems to be shockingly easy for someone to do this.

See https://community.bt.com/t5/Home-phone-including-Digital/How-to-prevent-malicious-fault-report-and-c...

[ChrisGee]

@garybs29 can fatbelly’s Mum give BT the authorisation to discuss the issue with him? That works with banks so why not BT?

[fatbelly]

We had full authorisation and open dialogue with BT but they refused to disclose what parts of my mothers security related information the hackers had used to convince BT to divert her services to their phone.  We eventually challenged BT's decision via Ofcom who concluded that BT had not secured my mothers account properly, but would/could not make BT share the critical information with us.  As a result, we are migrating here services away from BT.

[fatbelly]

Very common occurrence, not quite as bad as the PO scandal, but none the less smacks of very poor attitudes at management level.

[tarbat]

In my case I’m wondering if Computer Weekly might be a better approach than OFCOM?  I spent most of my working life in IT Security and Technology Risk Management, and the obscuration I’m getting from BT disgusts me.  Promises of “updates tomorrow”, and “it’s been referred to the fraud department” seem to get me nowhere.

[fatbelly]

I wish you luck. 

For us, all we wanted from BT was to understand the extent of the hackers knowledge of my mothers security credentials such that BT were convinced it was her.  IE, did they know her maiden name, date of birth, account number, direct debit amount etc?  We concluded that BT could not divulge this because it would expose their incompetence.  BT's attitude makes it very hard for us to protect my mother going forward, we were sickened by their attitude.  OFCOM did find them negligent however, sadly unable to help with the only thing we wanted - the details used by the hackers.  BTW - this is (allegedly via an IT security consultant we used after the event) a very common fraud occurrence with BT services.

[tarbat]

Halifax told me that this type of hack used to be quite common, but less so now. It sounds like you were looking for the same information I’m trying to get out of BT.

My questions:

1. What information did the hacker have about me that enabled them to convince BT to divert my landline calls and so perpetrate this fraud attempt? How did BT verify the hackers identity?

2. What can I do to prevent this happening again?

3. Why did BT send an email about this complaint to a yahoo.com email address that I have never registered, rather than my registered email addresses of xxxx and xxxx

4. Why did A staff member try to phone me on the hackers mobile number instead of the registered landline number?

5. When this hacker reported a fault and diverted all my calls, why Didn't BT:

- Call my landline to see if it was working? If they'd done that, I would have picked up the phone and talked to them, as the landline was working. There was NO fault.

- Call my registered mobile number to verify?

- Send a text to my registered mobile number to verify?

- Send an email to my registered email address to verify?