Unknown Number calls

CardBordWindow

Hi,

Can anyone explain to me why I'm getting calls from Financial Advice in Bank of Ireland from an Unknown Number? Are these bogus calls?

Surely having the number showing up on calls gives a better level of trust? I personally do not feel comfortable talking about my account with someone on a number that I can't confirm/reply to.

pwurple

I get those as well... mostly trying to get me off a tracker mortgage. I told them I didn't know who they were and I wouldn't be speaking to them.

CardBordWindow

Mine was just to 'touch base'. There's too much phishing and scams going on to be trusting Unknown numbers!

Mollywolly

I got a call from BOI (supposedly) last week. The number was withheld and I felt a bit wary of giving any info over the phone without confirmation, so I told him to call back. Said he would call again the following evening but never did, so still don't know if this really was BOI.

Personally, I think it's bad form to cold-call without revealing what number they're dialling from.

KoolKid

O2 are at this as well. Makes no sense to me whatsoever .:eek:
A terrible practice from any business to be honest.
I rarely answer private numbers anyway.

Bank of Ireland: Graham

Hi CardBordWindow,

We do have a Financial Advice Centre (FAC) in Bank of Ireland, who may contact you from time-to-time with a view to discussing your financial needs and to see if we can help you further. The phone number does show up as unknown, however, I've spoken with the head of the FAC department and they recognise your concerns and are actively looking to address them. If there is any change in this we'll keep you posted. The following link has an overview of financial need we may look to discuss, along with the contact number.

We take the privacy of your account very seriously, and although some verification may be required, we'll never ask for account numbers or confidential information such as PIN's. If you're ever concerned about whether or not the call is genuine, you can ask for the person's name and a contact number for their department so you can call them back.

We fully understand if you're not comfortable to discuss your account over the phone. You do have the option to remove the "Consent to Marketing" indicator from your account; which means you won't receive these phone calls in the future. You can remove this by calling 1890 365 100, by sending a letter to your local branch or by visiting them. Details for all our branches can be found here.

Hope this helps to clear things up.
Thanks,
Graham

Bank of Ireland: Graham

Hi pwurple,

Thanks for your post. I appreciate your concern. As described in my message above, if you're ever worried about the authenticity of the call you can ask for a name and number to ring them back. If you'd prefer not to speak with a financial advisor about your mortgage, you can opt out of these calls by removing the marketing consent from your account. To do this call 1890 365 100 or contact your account holding branch.

Thanks,
Graham

Bank of Ireland: Graham

Hi Mollywolly,

If you're ever in doubt, you can ask the caller for their name and their department number. You can verify the number by calling Banking 365 on 0818 365 365, or you're welcome to PM me and I can check it for you.

If you have any other concerns please let me know.
Thanks,
Graham

KoolKid

I understand there are many ways to verify a caller, but why not just turn on caller id .
Surly this is an obvious one for any business initiating these type of calls.
What is to be gained by withholding numbers??

CardBordWindow

KoolKid wrote: »

I understand there are many ways to verify a caller, but why not just turn on caller id .
Surly this is an obvious one for any business initiating these type of calls.
What is to be gained by withholding numbers??

Exactly!
I don't see why I should have to ask someone for their number to ring them back! I'm not going to spend my credit/add to my bill to verify, when surely having the caller ID on, so that I can save the number in my phone makes more sense.
If my phone is ringing and it says 'BOI Financial' calling, at least the call has some credibility, and makes me more inclined to answer the call.

EDIT: Just to add that the number for the FAC should be on bank literature, just like the 365 banking number is, for the reasons stated above.

Bank of Ireland: Graham

Thanks for your responses KoolKid and CardBordWindow,

Unfortunately the caller ID doesn't show up as a result of the outbound call system we currently use. However, we're working to address this issue. If there's any update on it we'll let you know.

Thanks,
Graham

Owen

More and more people are enabling their phones with software to automatically Blocked numbers. I do this, and I'm a BoI customer. You will never be able to call me from a blocked number, now or in the future. It's disgraceful that any institution that wants to discuss your personal information encourages you to discuss that information over a blocked number with anyone who could then use it to steal your identity.

21st Century BoI - get with it.

KoolKid

I find it unbelievable that any sophisticated phone system lacks the ability to enable CLI.

Tow

KoolKid wrote: »

I find it unbelievable that any sophisticated phone system lacks the ability to enable CLI.

It can probably can send out any CLI they want. The problem then becomes the receiver has more trust in the caller when they see a call from 1890 365 365 etc. However, it is relatively easy to spoof the number sent with call.

KoolKid

Tow wrote: »

However, it is relatively easy to spoof the number sent with call.

However is relatively easier still for a scammer to turn their ID off.
I'm sorry , but there is no excuse , especially for a financial institution, to hide their caller ID.

A monitoring station we use has 100s of lines but their out going calls always show the main number. Its not rocket science.

janiceross

Such calls must be very confusing. I felt obligated to post because I used to get similar calls before, too. It is not a private number, though. There was a phone number but it was unregistered.

Well, this man Harris told me my account's been suspended due to suspicious charges billed to it so I was advised to call a certain phone number to reach the bank's Fraud Department. Well, I did call and though I didn't think it was a scam, there were a lot of red flags. When somebody picked up, he sounded like he knew I was gonna call. He asked for sensitive information like my SSN, bank details and even for my date of birth. I was a victim of ID theft before and I learned that to verify my account, only one personal information is necessary. Could be my birth date, home address or the last 4 digits of my SSN. And NOT the entire SSN, nor the whole bank account number and NEVER the PIN. So instead of going through with the whole verification process, I hung up instead. Then I contacted my bank through the phone number I knew was theirs. And guess what? My instincts were right. The call was fraudulent and there was no need for me to worry because my account was totally okay.

janiceross

With your phone calls, I think it's best if you contact your telephone company and check on the phone number. I'm sure they'd be able to at least tell you where the call is from. Or better yet, try look it up from consumer complaint websites such as Callercenter to verify if it has been reported for any scam yet. If it would come up, then disregard the calls because it's definitely a scam. If not, investigate further.

harolds57

I think the reason with blocked numbers from a lot of companies now a day is because there routed out through a gsm network as it’s a lot lot cheaper. The PBX is set up so as to try sending the call out through say 5 mobile numbers and if all these 5 are in use then it will route it through the landline. Basically the mobile companies will only charge you for the sim card a month regardless of how many national calls you make which is a lot cheaper than what eircom or another service provider would charge.
Doesn’t excuse the fact that a company should call from an unknown number.

KoolKid

Certainly does not excuse a financial institution hiding their caller ID.
I also find it very hard to believe that any decent phone system can not be easily configured to send CLI.
Any update on this BOI?

Bank of Ireland: Graham

Hi all,

We appreciate all of your posts and based on the forum's feedback we're actively looking into this. We're currently reviewing our systems but as we hope you'll understand this may take a bit of time given the size of our business. We hope to provide an update in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks,
Graham

Slutmonkey57b

I think BOI are going to find that the standard "Office hours only", "we'll get back to you in a few weeks" banking culture is going to meet with a slight ... clash... with boardsie's expectations.

I am not a BOI customer but the bank I am with has a policy of not cold calling. You are only contacted by post with a request to arrange a call with the bank.
There are so many phone scams on the go, i would never ever entertain cold calling from any institution.

Ted_YNWA

If your ringing from a private number, dial 142 before the number you are ringing ... --> 142 086 1234567 and your number is displayed .

KoolKid

Ted_YNWA wrote: »

If your ringing from a private number, dial 142 before the number you are ringing ... --> 142 086 1234567 and your number is displayed .

Or you could just turn it on...

DAT64

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

I think BOI are going to find that the standard "Office hours only", "we'll get back to you in a few weeks" banking culture is going to meet with a slight ... clash... with boardsie's expectations.

I'm sure alot of companies with forums here deal with queries during "office hours only"!

I wouldn't expect them to be able to answer all questions off the top of their heads - I couldn't do that for the small company I work for!

On topic, I hate calls from private numbers.

Slutmonkey57b

DAT64 wrote: »

I'm sure alot of companies with forums here deal with queries during "office hours only"!

I wouldn't expect them to be able to answer all questions off the top of their heads - I couldn't do that for the small company I work for!

On topic, I hate calls from private numbers.

But these staff are based in the contact centre, according to the sticky. Which is out of hours.

So they've got out of hours staff, put them in an out of hours department, and got them to work standard banking branch hours. To answer queries which will mostly be posted and followed up ... out of hours. Because most companies block boards.ie.

Clever.

Bank of Ireland: Pat

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to post an update to let everyone know that we're expecting the number for our Financial Advice Centre (FAC) to become unblocked by the end of the month.

The number for the FAC will then be shown for all outbound calls. We appreciate all of the feedback that we've received on this thread.

Thanks
Pat

CardBordWindow

Good to hear.

Can you please post this number, so I can save it in my phone?

KoolKid

Glad to hear a positive update on this. Thanks Pat.

Bank of Ireland: Pat

Hi CardBordWindow,

We don't have the details of what the number will be yet. I'll post it here when we know for sure.

Thanks
Pat

Bank of Ireland: Pat

Hi all,

I just wanted to let everyone know how we've been getting on in relation to having the FAC phone number changed over to being unblocked.

Unfortunately, it won't be going ahead before the end of this month as planned. It has been delayed for a bit. I'll update again here when we have more information.

Thanks
Pat

KoolKid

Thanks for updating us Pat.
Any idea what's holding this up? I'd imagine its a fairly straightforward setting change.

Bank of Ireland: Pat

Hi KoolKid,

Apologies, but unfortunately I wouldn't be able to go into detail. I'll definitely update again when we have any further news to share.

Thanks again
Pat

KoolKid

No bother,thanks Pat

KoolKid

Nearly 4 months now. The last call I got from BOI was a private number.
Any update on this practice changing?

Bank of Ireland: Linda

Hi KoolKid,

Apologies we are still reviewing this issue and I have now escalated again for you.

Once we have an update, we will let you know by posting here.

Thanks
Linda

KoolKid

Hello linda and thanks for the response. Can you expand on reviewing?
Pats earlier post seems to suggest it had already been decided that the number was to be shown.

Bank of Ireland: Pat wrote: »

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to post an update to let everyone know that we're expecting the number for our Financial Advice Centre (FAC) to become unblocked by the end of the month.

The number for the FAC will then be shown for all outbound calls. We appreciate all of the feedback that we've received on this thread.

Thanks
Pat

Bank of Ireland: Laura

Hi KoolKid.

Apologies we have no further information on this as yet.
We are still looking into it and will post here as soon as we have an update.

Thanks
Laura

KoolKid

Seems to me as this is a U-Turn on Pats previous announcement. As a BOI customer I am very concerned that as a financial institution BOI do not appear to see the security issues in this unnecessary practice.