A Williams Lake senior is warning others after she was the victim of a scam where the caller claimed to be from TELUS.
The 82-year-old woman said she recently bought a new cell phone and has TELUS as her mobility provider.
As she had not received a bill to date, when her cell phone rang last week and the caller ID showed it was from TELUS, she assumed it was legitimate.
After the caller offered a 50 per cent deal as a TELUS promotion, the senior ended up giving the caller her social insurance number and credit card number.
She did not clue in that it was a scam until the caller asked for her bank account information.
“I’m not stupid and I know about these things, but it was the fact the caller display showed TELUS that fooled me.”
Lena Chen, media spokesperson for TELUS told the Tribune, in an email response, unfortunately many Canadians have experienced phishing calls, a type of scam where thieves, impersonating the government or businesses with large customer bases like telecoms or banks, attempt to trick someone into sharing sensitive personal or banking information.
To combat these scams, the company launched TELUS Call Control in 2020, a free feature available to all TELUS customers that blocks autodialed calls.
The feature requires unknown callers to listen to a brief message and manually respond with a one-digit code. The majority of nuisance calls, including scams, are generated by computer-dialers that enable spammers to dial many numbers at once…
