Scary call from "DirecTV"

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MitchDeerfield

SatelliteGuys Pro
Original poster
Feb 1, 2016
931
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Florida
This is really weird. I just had DirecTV installed at my home about a week ago. The DTV offer I took advantage of is the DTV Select package, which is $35 a month plus $7 a month for the upstairs bedroom. $42 a month for the first 12 months.

All of a sudden some guy pretending to be DirecTV claimed that he was going to lower my bill by half for the next 12 months. He had a foreign accent and he said I had to pay a year in advance and the discount was courtesy of Ebay, which was running a discount promotion.

No, but you can't pay with a credit card. Instead, you need to go out and buy a $250 Ebay gift card at CVS and call them back with the account number so you could get full credit. What a deal!

Of course, I had heard of this scam before, and once you give them the Ebay Gift Card number, you will never hear from them again.

What was scary about this call? They had ALL of my personal information, my private phone number, my address, my full name, the works. I have been called by scammers before but they usually call "blind" and had no information about me. Someone at DirecTV must be selling private information to these scammers, and that is scary. It is also good that I have a call blocker application on my cell phone, as the guy decided to harass me with several follow up calls after I told him to bug off.
 
They are likely the same CSR company in India that DirecTv contracts with, just working a little backside theft. Or somebody inside that group passes off the info to his buddies, and they do this and split the take.
 
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Everyone's info is for sale these days.
I'm almost sure my info was collected and sold by Wayfair. Never had a place need so much personal info just to sell me one item. My phone doesn't stop ringing with scammers and solicitors since I bought from them.
 
They are likely the same CSR company in India that DirecTv contracts with, just working a little backside theft. Or somebody inside that group passes off the info to his buddies, and they do this and split the take.

I agree with ncted, if you read the "privacy policy" for just about any big company they'll state outright that they may sell your personal information to third party partners. Once it is sold to those partners, it may be sold again and then again, so Directv/AT&T might not even know how the scammers are getting the info because it could pass through several hands before it gets to them. Maybe someone along the chain is knowingly selling to scammers, maybe one of them has been hacked and don't know scammers are stealing the info, but either way there isn't any way to stop it.

I don't ever answer the phone if it isn't a call I'm expecting - even if I had Directv service at home (I have cable) I wouldn't answer a call claiming to be from Directv. They'd have to leave a message and hope I call them back. Most scammers won't leave messages, because they want to catch people live without time to think about it or consult friends.
 
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One of the reasons why i asked them to stop using the ssn as an identifier.
The customer number and a secret password should be DTV identifier not ssn
 
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