[Hidden-tech] DirecTV scam

[Marcia Yudkin]

To anyone else who is a DirecTV subscriber, if you get a call saying that it's from AT&T (which owns DirecTV) and they are reprogramming the satellite in your area, it's a scam.
I am normally a very savvy consumer, but these guys (there were two of them) wasted more than a half hour of my time before I realized it was really, really fishy.

At first the guy said they had gotten a lot of complaints in my area and they therefore needed to reprogram our satellite receiver.  He asked me to turn the TV off so they could do the update, and it would take a few minutes.  Then he said, let me check your bill because I think we can give you a credit for the update.  (All this was going slowly and fitfully because he had an Indian accent that I was having trouble understanding... but the DirecTV technicians when you call in often have an Indian accent, so this didn't make me suspicious.)  He said I would get a $15 discount on my bill for 2 years.  Then he gave me a telephone number in the 512 areacode and an extension to call if I had any questions.  Then he transferred me to someone else who explained that there was a technical fee of $99 for the upgrade, but I would get a bill of $0 for two months to compensate for that.  I repeated that a few times to make sure I understood, and then he told me that he was going to give me an address to send the $99 to.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" I said.  "I'm not sending any money anywhere.  You need to bill me through my DirecTV account."

At that point I asked to get a phone number where I could call him back through AT&T, "because I think this is a scam."
"Ma'am, I'm authorized to cut off your reception right now," he replied.

"Please do!  I'm hanging up now..."

Then I called DirecTV and confirmed that it was a scam.  I gave them all the info from the call, and they said they would investigate.  

So what did I learn?  Next time I wouldn't even let the conversation get started.  I would ask right from the beginning for a way to verify that they were really calling me from a company that I did business with.  Thinking back, I don't believe they had my name or my account number - which they would if they were AT&T.

The business of simultaneously charging a fee and also giving me a discount is something DirecTV actually does - it happened that way when we upgraded our service to get local channels a couple of months ago - so that was not a giveaway.  No legitimate company would call a customer and ask them to send a check for something the customer had not requested, so that was what finally clued me in.

All this is presented as a public service!

Marcia Yudkin
Goshen


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