“He called me a bitch and hung up. Fun guy.” As far as customer service calls go, this was not the most friendly way things could have played out.
But this wasn’t a frustrated, underpaid customer service call centre worker going off script momentarily; this was the tail end of a scam call that didn’t go to plan.
Specifically, a crypto scam: a phone call talking about “blockchain” and a digital crypto wallet that the recipient had no knowledge of. In this case, it was easy to pick out the scam – no crypto investments, no wallet – but with more and more people dabbling in alternative investments, you can see how some targets might be bamboozled into handing over sensitive data.
It was not to be in this case; when challenged, the man on the phone turned abusive and ended the call. Zero point for customer service, zero points for effort.
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A more believable effort was aimed at another reader who was informed by a caller claiming to be from Visa that her card had been used fraudulently in the Philippines. As a result, they had frozen the card. Reasonable, right?
Less so was the assertion that they had frozen her online banking. Suspicions were raised, the call was ended and a quick call to the genuine bank number later confirmed that no fake transactions had been recorded.
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Those were just two examples in a matter of days. But things are about to get worse, particularly if you are an online shopper.
Blame the European Union’s (EU) new custom charges for online shopping outside the single market. There have been plenty of articles outlining how the new charge works, but in short, until July 1st, you could bypass customs charges on goods worth under €150.
Thanks to a new rule brought in for the entire bloc, you will now pay €3 for each unique item that you are buying. So for a pen that costs €1, you will now pay €4, and if you happen to buy some paper alongside that, you can add another €3 to the price.
And that’s assuming you are charged on checkout, and not by the delivery service. If it’s the latter, you can add on another few euro to cover the delivery company’s admin costs. It adds up quickly.
You may not even be aware that the goods are being shipped from outside the EU, or you may have temporarily forgotten about Brexit, which means anything coming from Britain will also be subject to the charge.
It closes a loophole that facilitated the flood of cheap goods coming into the country from overseas. It will also level the playing field for local and European-based retailers, and try to weed out goods that do not pass safety tests from coming into the EU.
You might make the point that some of these retailers are simply reselling the same low-cost goods with a markup, but that is a side note to the whole thing.
The end result is that consumers will pay more for the same items, whether they ship directly from the factory or through a third-party seller. They may still choose to go direct anyway – or in some cases, they may not have a choice, depending on the goods they are buying.
The new regime is still in its early days and may not have changed shopping habits just yet, but it has had one almost immediate effect: it has opened the door for a new wave of scams aimed at consumers.
It took a few days to get the first scam message: a text supposedly from An Post, claiming a parcel was awaiting release. Helpfully, it included a link where I could pay the release fee to an obvious scam website.
We should be used to this by now. It’s the same story whenever there is a shift in policy of this sort. Brexit unleashed a torrent of scam texts and emails seeking payment for phantom deliveries, some more convincing than others. It took weeks for things to settle to a more normal level of fraud.
This time around, regulators and phone companies have been putting measures in place to counter fraud. According to Three Ireland, it intercepted more than 650,000 fake texts in the first five months of this year.
And a year ago, ComReg implemented a registry for SMS senders, leaving those who did not sign up before a certain date with “Likely Scam” attached to their texts to customers. But the regulator says it isn’t enough, because those without a sender ID can still slip through the net. Anecdotally, any scam text that has reached my phone recently has come from what looks like an Irish number, avoiding being labelled as a scam.
With AI leading to increasingly sophisticated scams, it is urgent that something is done to help consumers get a handle on things. Anti-scam SMS filters – software that scans messages to look for potentially harmful content – have been suggested as the next step, although that requires the Government to implement legislation, which will take time.
In the meantime, the brunt of both the charges and the scams is being borne by ordinary consumers.
