[ale] OT: Cell phone survey scam

[Scott Castaline]

Just a heads up on a scam that started down in S. Fla that is now up here.

Last night my wife's smart-phone went down after receiving a message 
that her SIM card had been replaced as requested. Shortly after I 
received a call from my son telling me that his and my daughter-in-laws 
phones had done the same. My phone and my oldest grandson's phone were 
still working. After spending an hour on the phone with AT&T Customer 
Care we got the 3 phones suspended and a fraud alert was posted on my 
account. They also changed access to the account requiring a pin after 
sign-in.

Later my wife googled SIM card hacked and found that a new scam had 
recently been reported from S. Florida about this survey call. The 
caller ID on the phone will show up as ATT Customer Care and the caller 
has information about your account. In our case he knew that we had 5 
phones on the account. With that, my wife felt that it was legit, did 
the survey and the caller said that we'll receive a $20 credit on the 
next bill for each phone.

This morning we called ATT Fraud Dept. and were told that the survey was 
a scam and that we will probably see on the next cycle charges for 
international calls. Past victims have had hundreds of dollars in these 
international calls as well as data usage charges. They informed us to 
call the Fraud Dept when we receive these and they will be credited to 
our account. So now we have to go to an ATT store to get new SIMs for 
the 3 phones and get them reactivated.

Scott C