Protecting against scammers. BT Call Protect used effectively and successfully.
I have the full PoA for both health and wealth for my elderly sister who has advanced Alzheimer's and over the past two & half years have taken over the complete management of her life. Not easy, because I live permanently in Switzerland and she in South Devon. On top of that came Covid, so until this past June, I have not been able to visit her in person since December 2019.
She was forever being attacked by scammers, and after I obtained full PoA access to her accounts I set about putting a stop to it, including fighting with the banks to get help, virtually impossible on international call lines. I even created a new account and shifted all Bona Fide Direct Debits and income payments. However, new attempts kept being entered on the new account, which I promptly deleted. The problem was the phone scammers, phishing for bits and pieces of the house appliance information, bank account partial numbers building up enough information for their Database to send the inevitable letter "we will start to debit next week unless you cancel... ". Which my sister never did, she didn't understand what the letter was. She had lost several 1000s I estimate over time before I was able to stop all these debits. I also stopped all banking post to my sister's address, online access only, so she wouldn't have the number information anywhere. The biggest danger were still those "friendly" or "aggressively scary" phone call scammers.
What I did was the following. I have access to my sister's BT Account via the internet. She also has BT's Call Protect. I set it up first a list of VIP names of people I know who need to call her, then I set Call Protect to block all calls at any time of each day of the week. However, anyone in the VIP list can still get through. I tested this by waiting until she was once out of the house and then remove my VIP permission and tried to call her. Of course, it failed, I tried several numbers mobile and fixed phone numbers and suppressed number. Once I was sure, I reinstated myself. Fortunately, I am myself a pensioner, so I checked her BT callers every day and used the various scam caller check sites to see if the numbers were scammers. I also looked out for local area numbers, sometimes friends calling, maybe. These I rang and asked. Over time, I built up a VIP list of today 49 numbers, many of which I knew, Friends, Family, Doctor, Carer Management company etc. They all know they must use their registered phone number and NOT suppress their number. When I was over there this June, I was 11 days in the house, although daily scammers tried to call (I saw from the BT Website), not once did the phone ring unless it was a VIP person.
Mobile phones which were used to call, I entered in my WhatsApp Account and surprise, surprise, the pictures of these scammers sometimes appeared and their links to Facebook too. In one case I traced a potential scammer to his actual address in Bournemouth, know all scammer companies he has had in the past and also the court offences he has had. But he had only wanted to scam my sister, so no proof of anything.
For a while I reported every attempted scam call using the BT call, you can only Blacklist 100 numbers in your account you don't want to call you, useless, but you can report them to BT individually. Hope it has helped other persons.
Now the scam danger level seems to have dropped considerably. No longer are attempts being made to setup direct debits for "appliance and insurance" companies. I can sleep again at night, I still check the account daily, but now only once a day. The scammers can repeat their calls all they want, most of them are automated anyway.
So the bottom line is use BT Call Protect, set up a VIP list of callers and forbid any other callers including those who don't display their number. Only once did this happen that someone was trying to get through, then after a few attempts they used the number and I could call them back, it was someone from the Alzheimer's department from a hospital.
So I would say it is a pretty safe way to get peace of mind. It worked for me, but I am often using the computer, it was my profession. Ask for more information if it is not clear.
